A tip sheet for compulsive DVD buyers.
By Paul Gaita
Multiplex
DVD biz, please give me a break. I have to turn out a preview column every week for LA Alternative, and if what you’re giving me to present to our readers as the best new releases of the week is Just My Luck (Fox) or Psycho Midget Wrestling (Innovative) or Silent Hill (Sony), then you’re making my life very difficult. So cut it out. Or start bribing me. Either works.
Actually, there is a handful of great movies hitting shelves this week, and in all categories, so let me stop my whining and get the show on the road. First and best is Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity Special Edition (Universal), one of the slyest and snappiest ‘40s noirs, with Raymond Chandler providing the script and Fred MacMurray as a cold-blooded heel who partners with a conniving dame (Barbara Stanwyck, top notch) to murder her husband and collect the insurance. The Special Edition provides multiple commentaries (by screenwriter Lem Dobbs and critic Richard Schickel), as well as a 1973 TV remake. Also worth seeing, and from the Uni vaults, is Frank Capra’s wry and underrated State of the Union, which offers Spencer Tracy as a journalist turned Presidential candidate and Katherine Hepburn as his devoted wife. You’ll never go wrong with that team, period, end of sentence, and Capra lends his usual deft touch.
Uni’s got it covered on the TV front as well with House, M.D.: Season 2. The “baffling medical mystery of the week†angle occasionally strains credulity, but Hugh Laurie’s performance as the vain, curmudgeonly, Vicodin-addicted House is the series’ linchpin (though Robert Sean Leonard as his Dr. Watson more than holds his own). Extras include alternate takes, a very funny blooper reel, and a making-of featurette. Laurie’s pre-House career as one of Britain’s funniest television comedians also gets a showcase this week with Seasons One and Two of A Bit of Fry and Laurie (BBC Warner), a consistently excellent sketch comedy show with Laurie and actor/author Stephen Fry. Highly recommended for sketch fans and UK comedy enthusiasts.
Arthouse
From the Criterion Collection comes Noah (The Squid and the Whale) Baumbach’s Kicking and Screaming, an exceptionally smart and amusing look at post-graduate life through the eyes of a quartet of college friends; the cast includes indie stalwarts Josh Hamilton, Whit Stillman regular Chris Eigemann, Parker Posey, and Eric Stoltz, and Baumbach’s particular knack for all-too-human characters and sharp dialogue are in full effect here. On the completely opposite end of the arthouse spectrum is a double bill of Dennis Potter’s stunning BBC dramas The Singing Detective and Pennies from Heaven (BBC Warner); both were remade by Hollywood, but the original TV productions outshine them by miles; both features also helped bring two superb actors, Michael Gambon (in Detective) and Bob Hoskins (in Pennies) to international attention.
Grindhouse
Indie rockers, take note: your chance to see a teenaged Jenny Lewis in the thoroughly atrocious videogame adventure movie The Wizard (Universal) has finally arrived, and that’s all I really want to say about that title. I’d much rather direct you to Warner’s classic creature feature two-fer of Them! and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, the latter featuring one of Ray Harryhausen’s most memorable monsters, or Universal’s This Island Earth, a terrific ‘50s sci-fi adventure with spectacular (for its time) effects. I’d also point you to Tromeo and Juliet: The 10th Anniversary Edition (Troma), a lunatic, sexed-up and slap-happy retelling of the Shakespeare story, with Motorhead’s Lemmy providing narration. And if you really want it weird, look no further than Panik House, who bring you cult director Teruo Ishii’s final film, Blind Beast vs. Killer Dwarf, a crazy-to-the-bone freakshow based on a novel by Japanese mystery/horror author Edogawa Rampo. Ishii’s 1998 thriller Screwed, about a cartoonist’s downward spiral into insanity, is also on deck from Panik House.