MOVE OVER, ERIN BROCKOVICH.
Ronald Craven is the new (fictional, but still) messiah of indignant environmental activists everywhere.
As portrayed by Bob Peck (a well-heralded British actor who us Americans only know as the guy that played Muldoon in "Jurassic Park"), Craven is the main character in "Edge of Darkness," a BBC mini-series from 1985 that focuses on an international nuclear conspiracy that forever changes Craven's life when his activist daughter Emma (Joanne Whaley) is murdered because of it. And now that the much-praised, six-part collection is finally available on DVD in the United States, we turncoats can finally be pleasantly surprised by what all the fuss is about before Mel Gibson's movie remake comes out in Jan. 2010.
Continue Reading "Don't Want to Believe: 'Edge of Darkness: The Complete BBC Series' DVD" »
SINCE KURT COBAIN'S suicide in 1994, widow Courtney Love has done pretty much everything in her power to sell out his memory — if you've seen the Converses with his handwriting on them or played as him in the latest "Guitar Hero," you know what we mean. For real fans, though, the "Live at Reading" DVD set featuring Nirvana's legendary 1992 performance will be more satisfying than sneakers, video games or anything else Love could get her money-grubbing hands on.
Nirvana's second performance at the Reading Festival was a much-talked about — and plenty bootlegged — affair, coming a few months after Cobain's marriage to Love in Hawaii and the birth of their daughter, Frances Bean. As the concert's headliners, Cobain and Co. ripped through most of the material from their debut, "Bleach," the ridiculously successful breakout album "Nevermind" and the then-unreleased "In Utero," and the performance was later ranked No. 1 on Kerrang Magazine's "100 Gigs That Shook the World" list and voted as the band's greatest moment in a poll by NME.
So, then, it's obvious that "Live at Reading" will be a much-needed addition to your collection if you're still living the grunge dream.
Continue Reading "No Apologies: Nirvana, 'Live at Reading' DVD/CD" »
WHAT EXACTLY IS a boosh, and what makes this one so mighty?
Those are two questions unanswered — nay, ignored — during the four series of the comedy television show "The Mighty Boosh," which is immensely popular in the U.K. and a cult phenomenon over here.
Reminiscent of "The Young Ones" and "Monty Python's Flying Circus," "Boosh" is known for its trippy set pieces, anarchic plotlines and wide cultural spray, not to mention the chemistry between its two leads, Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding.
FORTY-TWO YEARS AFTER it first aired, "The Prisoner" remains one of the strangest and trippiest television dramas ever produced, blending the paranoia of "The Invaders," the fixed setting of "Gilligan's Island," the plot machinations of Kafka and the surrealist imagery of a painting by Dali or, more fittingly, De Chirico.
It has become a cult institution, its 17 episodes passed around on bootlegged VCR tapes, then finally released as one of the earliest DVD box sets in 2000, and finally given a polishing on A&E's new five-disc Blu-Ray set which will no doubt inspire media upgrades among diehard fans.
Playing off the success of James Bond and other romanticized Cold War spies, "The Prisoner" twists the concept by making the man of action into a victim of an organization that can neither be beaten nor outsmarted. Co-creator and lead actor Patrick McGoohan had played a spy on the immensely popular British "Danger Man" series in the mid-1960s, and he devised "The Prisoner" to play subtly and deviously off that role.
After abruptly resigning his job, McGoohan's unnamed secret agent is gassed and imprisoned on a remote island that acts as a sort of retirement center for other decommissioned agents. Number Six, as he becomes known, won't be so easily silenced, and each episode finds him devising some new means of resistance and escape. "I am not a number," he declares repeatedly, often to shocking derision or laughter from other characters.
Continue Reading "Existential Bars: 'The Prisoner' on Blu-Ray" »
THE GREAT THING about the Monty Python sketches and films — besides how funny they still are, 40 years later — is how much of an inside joke they've become. Ask a group of people about the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow — or start to sing about cross-dressing lumberjacks — and you'll be met with either whooping enthusiasm or blank stares. It's comedy that's almost as polarizing as the "Three Stooges": there's a very distinct and passionate cult of Python, and then there's everybody else.
"Almost the Truth — The Lawyer's Cut" (Eagle Rock) is a six-hour documentary that aired earlier this month on IFC and is out now on DVD. It includes recent interviews from the five surviving members of the group (John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones and Michael Palin) as well as archival interviews with the sixth founder, Graham Chapman, who died in 1989.
Still, "Almost the Truth" isn't really a great place for a Python neophyte; better starting points include the group's work itself, from the complete "Flying Circus" DVDs to its films ("Monty Python and the Holy Grail" chief among them).
Continue Reading "Documenting Hilarity: 'Monty Python: Almost the Truth — The Lawyer's Cut'" »
THERE ARE A LOT of great quotes in "Hori Smoku Sailor Jerry," zero of which are fit for newsprint. That pretty much sums up the ethos of the great tattoo artists of the 20th century. Ribald, crude, devil-may-care, rules-shunning brawlers who meticulously honed their craft in private — often in secret — these men (always men) behaved like brutes but worked like artists, and were always entertaining.
Erich Weiss' short documentary focuses on one, Norman Collins, who adopted the moniker "Sailor Jerry" and plied his trade in the rough-and-tumble port of Honolulu during World War II. Collins, a rabid libertarian of the nationalist bent, put aside his hatred of the Japanese only to borrow elements of the exquisitely inked and colored Japanese tattoo tradition with the clean, bold-lined playfulness of American skin art.
Along the way, he influenced, feuded with and inspired a generation of greats, many of whom provide the charming tough-guy commentary: Don Ed Hardy, Mike Malone, Zeke Owen, Lyle Tuttle, Philadelphia Eddie Funk (who is, the ending credits note, "still crazy") and Bob Roberts.
Less a straight biography of Collins than a wistful travelogue through the development of 20th-century tattooing and the rough-and-tumble times and men that drove it, "Hori Smoku" — the name is a pidgin honorific — is rather niche but wildly entertaining. Nowhere else will the curious viewer find so vivid a window into a world in which death loomed daily over the helplessly young, while they grasped with both hands all the gallows humor, resignation, bravado and lust the likes of Sailor Jerry could provide.
Photo courtesy Mike Malone Collection
SO IS IT wrong that we're totally underwhelmed by the repackaged box set for "Homicide: Life on the Street"?
David Simon fans, don't get offended — that's not any kind of slight on the man now best known for "The Wire" and whose nonfiction 1991 book, "Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets," inspired "Homicide," one of the best cop shows of all time.
Instead, it's more of a dig against A&E Home Video for repackaging the complete series and releasing the set without any new features or extras that separate it from the exact same product that came out in 2006.
Yup, that's right: The exact same thing — totally and completely identical, just with less-cool packaging.
Continue Reading "No New Clues: 'Homicide: Life on the Street' Complete Season DVD" »
FANS OF JOHN CLEESE'S dry British situational humor shouldn't need an excuse to rewatch any of the 12 outstanding episodes of "Fawlty Towers," but this week's release of the "Remastered" set certainly provides one.
After "Monty Python," Cleese went on to this short-lived series, which aired for only two seasons in the mid-1970s. Its premise is simple: Cleese stars as Basil Fawlty, the owner and operator of a hotel called Fawlty Towers, along with his insufferable wife Sybil (Prunella Scales). Waitress/maid Polly Sherman (played by Cleese's wife-at-the-time, Connie Booth) is responsible for untangling many of her boss's messes, and Spanish waiter Manuel (Andrew Sachs) is a convenient butt of jokes.
The new DVD set features commentary and interviews with the cast — including Booth, who has not commented on the show in decades. The real core of this set, though, are the remastered episodes. Here are five of our favorites:
Continue Reading "The Master Remastered: 'Fawlty Towers: Remastered'" »
BLATANTLY PUT, MTV'S latest attempt to milk "Jackass" for all its worth is a repetitive, extraneous collection of stunts, montages and outtakes that obsessed fans of the show are probably already familiar with — and that won't curry any favor with people foreign to it. In fact, if you pay careful attention to all the promotional material surrounding the DVD, you'll notice the "new-to-DVD" description of most of these stunts and pranks — as in, already available on the Internet (in fact, MTV essentially scooped itself by already posting most of these clips on the show's official Web site, Jackassworld.com) and totally not worth your precious time or $13 at Amazon.
The legend goes that most of this material was once "lost" and never included in any of the other DVD sets of "Jackass," and as a result, 93 different clips are available on this collection, from things like Johnny Knoxville testing out various self-defense methods (like super-concentrated red pepper spray, a stun gun and a Taser) to Preston Lacy wrapping himself in bubble wrap and becoming a human raft for Wee-Man, who then paddles him around a public lake, a swimming pool and a hot tub with an awkward mother-daughter duo, the former of whom encourages the latter to climb up on Lacy. Yeah, it's gross.
But aside the ick factor, most of this stuff is basically all available online from YouTube to Jackassworld.com, there are numerous places on the Interwebz where you can view these clips without spending your hard-earned cash.
Continue Reading "More Fiction Than Fact: 'Jackass: The Lost Tapes'" »
ON SEPT. 10, 1986, the comic Garry Shandling walked out onto a barely furnished stage and addressed a short monologue to his studio audience.
It was nothing out of the ordinary, except he wasn't on a talk show. Shandling was hosting his new sitcom on Showtime, "It's Garry Shandling's Show," and his first act was to knock down the fourth wall.
TV shows had acknowledged the presence of a camera before, but no one before or since has established such a rapport with a studio audience from a sitcom set.
"It's Garry Shandling's Show" is making its bow in a 16-disc DVD set that includes outtakes, interviews and some oddball commentaries from Shandling himself. Over 72 half-hour episodes, he and show co-creator Alan Zweibel discover the comic possibilities of breaking every sitcom rule.
Continue Reading "TV Without a 4th Wall: 'It's Garry Shandling's Show'" »
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