DVD and Blu-Ray Releases This Week

Cult and classic favorites, new editions, and complete series collections dominate today’s new release schedule.

Christmas is a little over nine weeks away, and already the movie studios and television networks are pumping out special editions of DVD and Blu-Ray sets unmistakable for their gift potential, including new editions and expanded versions of cult and classic favorites. This week shows a pretty broad cross section of the last forty years of film and television, including at least one half-forgotten classic TV series, possibly the best cop show ever, and a half-dozen other, smaller releases with appeal to more selective audiences.

The big release this week, of course, is Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen on DVD and Blu-Ray. Nevertheless, the following is just a sampling of what else is available, including the suggested manufacturer’s list price. Of course, prices may vary according to retailer, and will likely decrease as the holidays bear down on us.

Planes, Trains, & Automobiles – “Those Aren’t Pillows” Edition ($14.98)  Boasting career highs from both writer-director John Hughes and co-star John Candy, this 1987 classic features Steve Martin as Neal Page, an uptight Chicago executive stuck in a series of accidents, near-accidents and strokes of bad luck while trying to fly home for Thanksgiving. Candy plays Del Griffith, the slovenly shower curtain ring salesman who dogs his every errant step and false move. The chemistry between Candy and Martin is almost legendary, with each new calamity building on the last to overwhelm the mismatched travelers. Full of quotes and scenes you’ll re-create with friends through the holidays. “Dell Griffith, please to meet you.”

This new DVD includes Hughes and Candy retrospectives and a deleted scene.

Monsoon Wedding – The Criterion Collection ($39.95) This 2001 dramatic comedy won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and helped reignite foreign film afficianados’ love affair with Bollywood cinema. Directed by Mira Nair (the upcoming Amelia), the story follows the entanglements and complications arising from a traditional Punjabi wedding, showing the ups and downs of both the family members and the servants on whose shoulders the celebration ultimately rests. Maybe some of the characters are a bit broad, and the observations a little precious, but audiences who enjoy family centered works such as this probably won’t care anyway.

The Criterion edition contains all the usual premium-grade extras you’d expect, including three short documentaries about India directed by Nair. Also available on Blu-Ray disc.

Easy Rider ($38.96) - The iconic road movie about 60s rebellion comes – only a little ironically – to Blu-Ray disc with a new featurette and commentary by director and co-star Dennis Hopper. For those few who don’t already know, the 1969 film follows two rebels (Hopper and Peter Fonda) as they drive from California to New Orleans in order to see Mardi Gras. Along the way they pick up a small-town lawyer (Jack Nicholson, in his star-making role) who shares their disillusionment with society and its trappings. For a treatise on freedom, the film’s attention to form, structure, and even geographic accuracy are appropriately loose, with digressions and long talky passages frequently interrupting the travelogue montage sequences. And the infamous ending, though explosive at the time, today feels both pretentious and stiff. Still, the movie overall captures the era’s zeitgeist, even while as a work of cinema it gets creakier by the year.

Vega$: The First Season Volume 1 ($36.98) More than twenty years before the sexy lab rats of CSI:, Las Vegas was kept safe by freewheelin’ private detective Dan Tanna (Robert Urich), cruising the streets in his vintage Thunderbird and solving cases with his bumbling sidekick and single-mom secretary. The show is vintage late 70s cheese, right down to the swanky, horn-driven music and do-your-thing attitude, and with his cool car and hip bachelor pad Tanna is the archetypal private eye of the period. Urich, who might be described not unkindly as the Tim Daly of his generation, holds the show down thanks to his easy charm. The three-disc set includes the first half of the first season, though why CBS video wouldn’t spring for the other half is anybody’s guess.

Homicide: Life On The Street – The Complete Series ($149.95) About as far from Vega$ as humanly possible in tone and approach alike, NBC’s critically-adored, audience-starved 1993-99 procedural consistently struggled to find its audience, and no wonder. The show was simply ahead of its time, as demonstrated by the success of The Wire, Homicide creator David Simon’s later effort and a sequel to this earlier series in all but name. Based on Simon’s book chronicling his year with the Baltimore Police homicide department, Homicide the series ranks among the best television ever produced, and for our money it’s the best cop show ever. Utterly and completely riveting for six of its seven seasons, with the seventh (following the departure of breakout star Andre Braugher) being only very good. The middle seasons depicting the mammoth “Luther Mahoney Saga” are essential viewing for any cop show fan.

The equally mammoth 35-disc collection includes all 122 episodes, three crossover Law & Order episodes, and the 2001 telepic Homicide: Life Everlasting, which served as coda and elegy and for the series.

The Hunger: The Complete Second Season ($39.98) Possibly the closest thing Generation X’ers might ever get to their own Twilight outside of the Whedonverse (True Blood arguably notwithstanding), the second and final season of this British anthology series featured demons, vampires, and smart erotica mixed into a potent swirl and hosted by David Bowie, who at 62 years old still has more erotic cool than the somnambulant hipsters of Twilight likely ever will.

The four disc set includes all 22 episodes, produced by Tony and Ridley Scott and featuring appearances by Anthony Michael Hall, Giovanni Ribisi, Eric Roberts, Brad Dourif, Jennifer Beals, and many others. The first season, hosted by Terrence Stamp, is also available.

- Michael Kabel

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Seven Film Presidents Worth Voting For

Fictional chiefs of sates we wish could lead us through the real world.

With the end of the two major parties’ conventions last week, we got to thinking about fictitious presidents who, unfortunately for America, only exist in the movies in which they appear. By that we mean not actual presidents of the past played by actors but rather characters in movies that we’d “make real” if we could. We are cursed to live in interesting times, to quote the old Chinese expression, and we could use leaders with their kind of conviction and vision.

The usual caveats apply below, the same ones that are starting to sound like a stump speech: no particular order, purely subjective, blah blah blah… And to quote Richard Nixon, let me make one thing perfectly clear: this list is bipartisan, and intended as totally objective regarding its’ members’ political affiliation.

1. The President, Fail-Safe (1964) Played by: Henry Fonda. A great leader because: He makes the hardest decision of all time. When a computer error irretrievably sends a U.S. bomber squadron to drop atomic warheads on Moscow, Fonda’s nameless president sweats out the bombers’ approach in a bunker far underground, connected to the Kremlin via telephone and translator (Larry Hagman). Faced with all-out Soviet retaliation, he makes an unthinkable choice, one with a terrible logic that nonetheless carries a staggering cost. 20/20 Hindsight: The prospect of accidental nuclear war was absurdly plausible throughout the 1960s, and a favorite subject of books and cinema including Stanley’s Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb. But here director Sidney Lumet loads on the realistic details and gradually building pace until the reality of such a mistake takes a palpable toll on the audience (spoiler warning):

2. James Marshall, Air Force One (1997) Played by: Harrison Ford. A great leader because: He’s a badass. From his opening speech declaring the U.S. will hunt down terrorists with impunity to his bravado defending the titular jet from hijackers, Ford’s Marhsall is basically President Han Solo. 20/20 Hindsight: Gritty and self-determined, this kind of presidential chest-thumping was likely more appealing eleven years ago, before the current president’s “Mission Accomplished” fiasco or the long years of Monica Lewinski and still before 9/11. Whatever, Ford as president was an idea for its time: posters read simply, “Harrison Ford is the president of the United States;” the film grossed $172 million. 

3. Dave Kovic, Dave (1993) Played by: Kevin Kline A great leader because: He’s a president of the people, for the people. Temp agency staffer Kovic gets installed into the Oval Office after the real president, whom he looks just like, is incapacitated during an indiscreet moment. But in sweetest film-fable form, Kovic starts running the country his own way, a way largely based on simple wisdom and populist optimism. Of course he has to stand up to a bevy of challenges, including a Karl Rove-like chief of staff (Frank Langella) as well as constant scrutiny from the media and suspicion from the real president’s wife (Sigourney Weaver) and a dour Secret Service agent (Ving Rhames). 20/20 Hindsight: Possibly superfluous among the “new day dawning” atmosphere of Clinton’s first year in office, this very Kapra-esque dramedy views today like a pretty bauble from another era, which is probably what director Ivan Reitman intended all along.

4. Jackson Evans, The Contender (2000) Played by: Jeff Bridges A great leader because: Like Teddy Roosevelt and Jack Kennedy before him, Evans is a man of principle unafraid to play hardball to push real change through myopic government. His championing of atheist, pro-choice Senator Laine Hanson (Joan Allen) as a replacement Vice President ignites a firestorm of controversy, until he steps in and shames Congress with an oratory pimp slap upside the head. 20/20 Hindsight: Bridges, who incredibly has never won an Oscar, was thought a shoo-in for Best Supporting Actor (Benicio Del Toro won for Traffic.) The film is sometimes criticized as dogmatic and partisan. Just the same, it was an overdue breakthrough for Allen and provoked plenty of debate upon its release, just three weeks before the 2000 presidential election.

5. Tom Beck, Deep Impact (1998) Played by: Morgan Freeman A great leader because: Serene and intelligent, Beck’s leadership helps America prepare for literally the end of the goddamned world. Even admitting the military had been preparing a nuclear counterstrike against the looming meteor for years doesn’t seem disingenuous once Beck reveals its purpose. 20/20 Hindsight: Pre-millennium tension was expressed via disaster movies throughout 90s cinema, and Deep Impact was an atypically intelligent approach to the Doomsday scenario. It also features a black president, while The Contender promises a female Vice President. Less than a decade later, one of these will be a reality this November.

6. Jordan Lyman, Seven Days In May (1964) Played by: Fredric March A great leader because: He does what’s right, not what’s popular or even safe for his own well-being. As President Lyman prepares to sign a bitterly controversial disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union, his administration finds itself the target of a military coup d’etat led by Air Force Joint Chief of Staff General James Mattoon Scott (Burt Lancaster). Lyman resists Scott’s aggression the same way he refuses to buckle to partisan criticism – by staying true to what’s best for the Republic. More than a “let history judge me” autocrat, Lyman acts according to his own conscience, despite all consequences. 20/20 Hindsight: A military takeover of the government seems unlikely today, but consider how unpopular international diplomacy has become in favor of saber rattling and the film remains ahead of its time.

7. Bill McKay, The Candidate (1972) Played by: Robert Redford A great leader because: There’s got to be a better way! McKay tells it like it is with the simmering sarcasm Redford played so well throughout the 70s and early 80s. Every so often Mr. Sundance mentions doing a sequel depicting the last days of the McKay presidency. Bring it on, already! 20/20 Hindsight: Though technically detailing JFK-esque reform activist McKay’s run for the California Senate seat, this so-70s-it-hurts satire by director Michael Ritchie (Fletch, The Bad News Bears) has remained hilariously prescient thanks to the existence of would-be candidates like Gary Hart, Dan Quayle, John Edwards, et al - any young up and comer who grab at the mantle of Kennedy youth and glamour. McKay’s meltdown into senseless, jingo-heavy slogans – shown in the clip below – is a classic moment of political skewery.

Full disclosure: We’re aware this topic has been covered before – several times – by other sites. We saltue them for their inspiration, and for charting a course into this fascinating cinematic niche. Thank you, and may God bless America.

 - Michael Kabel 

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