April 2010 Archives

DVD UPDATE: Andy Kaufman lives!

April 27, 2010 2:06 PM

Two of the coolest, and rarest, things on TV are surprise and ambiguity. Not just "We're soooo complex" surprise/ambiguity, but real, stunning "What the bleep is happening?!"

Two words: Andy Kaufman.

And not the comfy foreign guy of Taxi. The weird, inexplicable, scary, confrontational Andy of all those Saturday Night Live appearances. He was merely weird lip-synching the Mighty Mouse theme on the sketchfest's 1975 premiere. But he was absolute hate-mail bait in 1979 when he started challenging women to wrestling matches.

The new DVD Andy Kaufman: World Inter-Gender Wrestling Champion flashes us back to those crazy days of is-it-or-isn't-it performance art. Andy took it from sketch bit to the pro wrestling ring to pop culture controversy. After he started offering $1,000 and his hand in marriage to any woman who could pin him, he became a lightning rod. SNL actually had viewers vote on whether Andy should be allowed back on the show. With nearly 400,000 votes cast, he lost.

This hour compilation doesn't include the SNL footage (rights issues?), but its collection of actual wrestling bouts and bluster is interwoven with something yet more amazing -- intimate interview footage in which Kaufman seems to be speaking sincerely (another guise?) about the whole thing. He says he wanted to hark back to the days of the traveling carnival, when a grappler would challenge members of the local audience. But Kaufman couldn't challenge men. He'd lose. So he challenged women instead.

That brainstorm fit perfectly into Andy's characters-and-hoaxes comedy style, which also presented us with abusive lounger singer Tony Clifton, the foreign man who morphed into Taxi's Latka, and, lest we forget, the lingering notion that Kaufman may have staged his own 1984 cancer death and continues to roam the earth pranking us all.

We should be so lucky.

The MicroWerks DVD also includes a bonus hour of Kaufman's wrestling rants at The Comedy Store. It's poor-quality home video, but a rich look at a master doing his thing.

Other DVDs out April 27:

I Love Lucy: The Movie and Other Great Rarities -- If you've got the complete series set, you've already got this disc. It's the bonus compilation led by an early '50s movie stitched together for the European market from three existing I Love Lucy episodes plus new connecting footage. The coolest goodie here is probably the recently colorized episode "Lucy Goes to Scotland." It's really accurately colorized -- no, really! -- and offers a glimpse of what the series might have looked like had color TV already been perfected.

Earth Days -- This is last week's American Experience documentary, plus commentary from director Robert Stone (and also his 1972 film Pollution). The non-narrated history takes a lyrical look at the trashing of our country's ecology by 20th century "progress," and the environmental movement that sprang up to stop it. Illustrating the tale is lots of cool vintage footage, of such high-quality color that it effectively becomes a sort of you-are-there time trip. Stone's approach is clear-eyed, too, noting not just industrial despoiling but also the naive missteps of early save-the-planet idealists. Highly recommended.

It's Garry Shandling's Show -- For those who opted not to get the complete series box released last October, Shout Factory is now releasing single season sets of Shandling's savvy rule-breaking '80s Showtime delight (later seen on Fox). He takes us into his confidence playing a heightened version of himself -- a standup comic living in a Sherman Oaks condo -- for a winking mockery/homage to both suburban sitcom cliches and showbiz itself.

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DVD DEAL: 'Life' deep discount!

April 22, 2010 1:26 PM

Discovery's DVD/Blu-ray releases of the epic docuseries Life won't be out until June 1, but in honor of Earth Day, there's an amazing discount for Thursday only -- $50 for a Blu-ray combo of Life and Planet Earth.

It's just $40 for the DVD combo of Life and Nature's Most Amazing Events, or the combo of Planet Earth and Blue Planet on DVD. Those are huge discounts over not only list price but most sale pricing.

Important caveat: These are the Discovery releases of these shows, which means you'll hear the American voices of Discovery Channel narrators Oprah Winfrey for Life and Sigourney Weaver for Planet Earth.

Some fans prefer the original British narration tracks by nature-meister David Attenborough -- and that would mean buying the BBC Video disc sets. You can find those at Amazon here (Life on Blu-ray for $49, on DVD for $42, as of April 22).

Both versions of Life will be released on disc June 1, so these are pre-orders.

Another Earth Day deal is at Amazon -- David Attenborough's BBC version of Planet Earth on Blu-ray for $38 and on DVD for $32, Thursday only.

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FLICK PICKS: Fun with split screens and film festivals

April 21, 2010 3:53 PM

Just old movies? Think again. Turner Classic Movies is always thinking outside the box that holds the Warner/MGM film library from which the channel was launched 16 years ago this week. They've added lots more titles, many of them newer, and they've found increasingly clever ways to lovingly package their film presentations for both edification and sheer fun.

Take Wednesday night's theme. TCM usually builds around one every night, and sometimes during the daytime, too -- often a specific actor or director, a genre, a setting, a historical moment, or a cinematic technique.

Wednesday falls under that last category, spotlighting three movies that tell their stories using split-screen geometry -- Norman Jewison's original 1968 heist The Thomas Crown Affair with Steve McQueen (Wednesday at 8 p.m. ET, TCM), John Frankenheimer's 1966 road race epic Grand Prix with James Garner (Wednesday at 10 p.m. ET, TCM) and 1973's obscure "Duo-vision" gimmick thriller Wicked, Wicked (Wednesday night at 1 a.m. ET, TCM). Watch the screen split and split and split again in this online Thomas Crown Affair clip.

This weekend, TCM thinks outside the TV box itself, by sponsoring its first four-day Classic Film Festival in Hollywood. Bringing the virtual community of TCM fans to actual fruition, classics will be screened the way they were meant to be seen, and film greats will mix with fans at salutes, panels and parties. Tab Hunter introduces Damn Yankees, Esther Williams presents Neptune's Daughter, Jerry Lewis takes questions about The King of Comedy, and John Carpenter discusses remakes like his '80s The Thing. And lots more. You can get all the details here.

You can also get a taste of the Classic Film Festival on the tube without heading west. This Thursday through Sunday, TCM is running nightly mini-marathons keyed to festival events.

Thursday features a five-film salute to the 20th anniversary of The Film Foundation, the Martin Scorsese-led push to preserve and celebrate "endangered cinema treasures" -- among them, this night's offerings of The Red Shoes, Once Upon a Time in the West, The River, Bonjour Tristesse, and 1932's little-seen Adolphe Menjou mystery The Night Club Lady. (That's West heavy Henry Fonda being very, very bad at the top of this column.)

Friday's double feature honors the mastery of visual effects pioneer Douglas Trumbull in 1968's 2001: A Space Odyssey and 1977's Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Saturday spotlights some of the classics whose behind-the-scenes production drama made for fascinating Vanity Fair articles -- The Graduate, The Magnificent Ambersons, Reds and Rebel Without a Cause.

Sunday wraps things up by exploring the history of Hollywood, in Singin' in the Rain, Sunset Boulevard and the 1923 silent Souls for Sale, showing how people were doing anything even back then to get famous in Hollywood.

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DVD UPDATE: Serious soap, circa '80s

April 20, 2010 4:23 PM

At least Dallas had a sense of humor. Larry Hagman's adulterous oil man J.R. Ewing? C'mon. He had his tongue firmly in-cheek through all his dastardly deeds.

Falcon Crest, though -- not so much. This Friday night companion to CBS' top-rated '80s prime-time soap switched the suds setting from Texas to California wine country, where Jane Wyman was the formidable force determined to run the family business her own way, come hell, high water or pesky relatives.

Warner Home Video's new Falcon Crest: First Season DVD set introduces Wyman in all her steely glory, already trying to screw another heir to the vineyards out of his due. That would be Robert Foxworth, an upright airline pilot from New York City (of course), who returns to the ancestral fields for his father's funeral and winds up staying to become aunt Wyman's primary thorn in the side. He brings along his writer wife (the underused Susan Sullivan) and two whiny almost-grown kids (who swiftly become even more dreary and eventually get expelled altogether).

Wyman would rather have her clan's deals done by her vacant stud nephew (Lorenzo Lamas, who looks mah-velous), and she exploits all her sundry family members, hangers-on and servants as pieces in her nasty little chess game.

The whole thing was made fun in its original '80s run, of course, by our off-screen knowledge that Wyman had been Wife No. 1 to then-president Ronald Reagan. Compare and contrast -- Jane and Nancy. Imagine Jane's scheming character Angela Channing running Ronnie's life. The imagination runs rampant.

Falcon Crest does pick up the pace in subsequent seasons, thanks largely to the exit of lagging cast members and additions like shifty antagonist David Selby, local priest Ken Olin (pre-thirtysomething), and daytime soap diva Kristian Alfonso (Days of Our Lives).

It's interesting to note how nuance was not in this series vocabulary. The bad are bad, the good are good, and Lamas stands around looking studly. Certainly an '80s flashback.

(Speaking of which, last week saw the release of Dallas: Season 13, the next-to-last year, which took the quintessential nighttime soap into the '90s.)

Luckily, this week's TV DVD release schedule boasts another nostalgic entry that's much more clever and enduring. The Bill Cosby Show was a 1970 half-hour filmed single camera, concerned less with laughs than with observing human behavior. Call it quiet comedy, tracing Cosby's work as a high school teacher/coach, as well as his relationship with his mom, dad, girlfriends, pals, oddball encounters and various vexing inanimate objects.

In his first sitcom after I Spy, Cos is cool and casual, but not yet over the top with it. (Except for maybe that hoo-yaw nonsense vocal over Quincy Jones' jazzy credits theme.) The Bill Cosby Show extends the feel of his career-making nightclub comedy routines/records, pinpointing small moments in daily life, and gently poking fun rather than mocking.

On this new second (and final) season DVD set, you've gotta love the guest stars, too -- veterans like Dick Van Dyke and Don Knotts, alongside up-and-comers like Mark Harmon, Antonio Fargas, John Amos, Gloria Foster, Vonetta McGee and Mark Hamill. Some episodes are set up almost as two-handers to showcase the Cosby-guest interaction, while others are lively ensembles with Cosby's Chet Kincaid bouncing off other teachers or barber shop patrons.

Don't look for punchlines or clever dialogue. Do savor the rich human foibles in warm characters and relatable situations.

There's only one bonus feature -- Cosby sitting back recently to reminisce about the show's making, paying special attention to his insistence that black crew members be hired into what were then overwhelmingly white behind-the-camera crafts.

(Note that this second season is not in stores but can be ordered online directly from Shout Factory.)

Also out this week:

Perry Mason: Season 5, Volume 1 -- Nice to see that Raymond Burr's classic '50s-'60s courtroom/detective favorite is still in the release lineup. Too many series see their DVD sales fall off in subsequent seasons, and some distributors are quick to discontinue vintage shows mid-run. Fans might consider the importance of supporting their favorites by continuing to buy in order to keep the later seasons coming. (I'd prefer each season in a single set, but distributors seem convinced fans would rather buy them in pieces at lower prices.)

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SEE HERE: Sue Sylvester strikes a pose

April 14, 2010 11:03 AM

C'mon, vogue! You can do it already, even though Sue Sylvester's Glee music video doesn't hit Fox air till April 20.

Jane Lynch makes a pretty good Madonna. This isn't a Vogue parody, folks. It's tribute -- shot by shot by black-and-white shot.

Hulu has it here, or you can watch the embed below.

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DVD UPDATE: 'Party Down'

April 13, 2010 11:25 AM

Party Down came out of nowhere to become one of my favorite shows, and I'm not the only one. There's a sizable cult for this little Starz comedy gem about a team of Hollywood cater-waiters who'd rather be (pick one) actors, screenwriters, comedians or other credits-worthy creatives. Instead, they're stuck serving up drinks and strange-shaped hors d'oeuvres at singles mixers, high school reunions, sweet sixteen parties, and porn awards ceremonies. (You can imagine what those hors d'oeuvres look like.)

The new Season 1 DVD set is a must-have, so read the full review on our DVD page (teased in the home-page column to the right of For Better or Werts). It's a tight little two-disc set of 10 episodes that pick up steam as they roll along in their meandering way, with cut-loose guest stars like Enrico Colantoni, J.K. Simmons and Kristen Bell [photo at right]. Commentaries add to the fun of this surprise treat cooked up by Veronica Mars creator Rob Thomas and his comic cohorts.

The second season of Party Down starts April 23 on Starz, and it's worth marking on your calendar. I've seen the first three episodes, and they only get better and better. Jane Lynch has left the cast for Glee, but Megan Mullally introduces an entirely different energy. Where Lynch was a droll veteran actress on the skids, Mullally is a new arrival barging into town to make her daughter Escapade (love it) a star.

Check out the review, and buy Party Down on DVD here.

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FLASHBACK: 'Twin Peaks,' 20 years later

April 8, 2010 11:25 PM

Hard to believe it's been two decades since TV's weirdest show hit the screen. Hard.

Twin Peaks still looks mondo bizarro, so you can only imagine (or maybe remember) how truly warped this serial surreality seemed in the network midst of Matlock and Murder, She Wrote.

But on April 8, 1990, TV drama grew up, into something truly exciting and mind-blowing, when ABC premiered David Lynch's hallucinatory murder mystery Twin Peaks. Bodies wrapped in plastic. "Who killed Laura Palmer?" The Log Lady. The backwards-talking dwarf. Cherry pie and damn fine cups of coffee. Hair turning white overnight. Small towns would never look so serene again.

It's late in the day, but I wanted to hit the 20-year anniversary on this one, so I'll leave the rest of the writing up to you.

What did you make of Twin Peaks? Have you watched it since? Does it hold up? And what about its lasting impact?

(Twin Peaks can be seen today on Chiller cable/satellite, or on DVD. It's also streaming at CBS.com.)

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DVD UPDATE: Abbott & Costello go insane!

April 6, 2010 12:41 PM

"How dare you remind me of somebody I hate?!" With that woman passerby's out-of-the-blue stoopside smack attack, umbrella whack and furious stomp-away, I was hooked.

The Abbott & Costello Show makes absolutely no sense. It's virtually Dada-esque in its spontaneous insanity. Free-form verbal torrents give way to thunks and wallops. Blitzes of banter explain how 7 x 13 = 28.

If "who's on first" is how you know Abbott & Costello, this new complete-series DVD set is a great chance to dive more deeply into slap-your-own-face lunacy. The burlesque comedy couple turned movie blockbuster team would throw out even the pretense of reason when they tackled TV in its early years with their own syndicated comedy show (1952-54). Beholden to no network, financing their own 52 episodes of stream-of-consciousness idiocy, they let loose a memorable parade of -- well, nothing.

That's right. "Nothing." The same kind of nada-ness that would make Seinfeld a '90s TV sensation. Forty years earlier, mustachioed straight man Bud Abbott and rotund buffoon Lou Costello were laying down a legend that Jerry Seinfeld would absorb as a Long Island tyke watching slapstick reruns. His eventual series descendant might have a little more slickness and substance (relatively speaking) than its spiritual ancestor. But Abbott & Costello embody a raw directness that's more primal, that goes for the gut rather than the mind.

In other words, The Abbott & Costello Show is simple. Really simple. No, even simpler than that. Their lead characters are two losers who live and don't-work together, a la Laurel & Hardy and other they-just-are comedy teams. Their daily lives are a surreal succession of run-ins around their backlot neighborhood with their angry bald landlord (Sid Fields), the local cop on the beat (Gordon Jones), some foreigner-of-the-week (Joe Kirk), a sleek blonde neighbor who's essentially just The Girl (Hillary Brooke), and an utterly inexplicable 40-year-old spoiled sissy tot in full Easter-best outfit (Joe Besser, soon to be one of the latter-day Three Stooges).

They're just types. The jokes are gags and pratfalls, or routines probably older than burlesque itself. The plots aren't even paper-thick. If the contemporaneous success of I Love Lucy was paving the way to the future of the TV sitcom, The A&C Show was documenting an art form that was practically out the door already. The burlesque stage was where Bud and Lou had honed their hoary routines -- "their" being used loosely, since the likes of "Slowly I turned" and "Crazy house" had been done for decades by anybody and everybody. Puns, double meanings, misdirection and general confusion reigned amid "storylines" that were really nothing more than conjunctions to hold together random outbreaks of absurdity.

That whimsical world is well served by E1 Entertainment's 9-disc DVD box The Abbott & Costello Show: Collector's Edition, which holds the entire oeuvre, if you will. Each of the show's two seasons comes in its own 4-disc fold-out set, with another single-disc bonus package that also includes four oversized collectible postcards of the team. If not best of all, then at least equal to any of these is the 44-page Commemorative Book with a comprehensive episode guide (indicating what routines are in which episodes), cast biographies, and essays to provide context for both the show's and the team's place in American comedy history.

Bonus features range from the professional -- the 1978 Hey, Abbott! tribute hour hosted by that other joke memorializer, Milton Berle -- to the personal, with home movies hosted by Costello daughters Chris and Paddy.

The black-and-white episode transfers look pretty good, and they include chapter stops and English subtitles. (Plus a handy reel that collects the most classic routines.)

The Abbott & Costello Show: Collector's Edition is available with a generous discount from Amazon here.

Also out April 6:

Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years 1954-1965 -- Henry Hampton's acclaimed 1987 miniseries documents the landmark civil rights movement in 6 hour episodes on 3 discs. Bonus filmmaker interview.

Sharpe's Challenge/Sharpe's Peril -- The two latest Sharpe adventures from Bernard Cornwell's period novels follow the 19th century British officer (Sean Bean) to India. Each available on both DVD and Blu-ray.

The Unusuals -- ABC's quirky NYC cop series with Amber Tamblyn and Jeremy Renner is exclusive to Amazon.com (click on title link), where one reviewer calls it "Barney Miller on speed and on the streets."

Blood Ties: The Complete Series -- Lifetime's vampire private-eye import (based on Tanya Huff's Blood Books) now offers both seasons on either DVD or Blu-ray.

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FLICK PICKS: April salutes to George Stevens, Robert Taylor

April 5, 2010 4:27 PM

Monday night's George Stevens roundup kicks off April's director of the month tribute from Turner Classic Movies, screening three of Stevens' biggest titles and his own son's acclaimed clip-filled salute. The Texas-sized 1956 epic Giant (April 6 at 8 p.m. ET, TCM) with James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson leads into 1984's George Stevens: A Filmmaker's Journey (11:30 p.m. ET, TCM) from longtime American Film Institute leader George Stevens Jr. They're followed overnight by the essential 1953 western Shane and 1935's Barbara Stanwyck vehicle Annie Oakley (1:30 and 3:45 a.m. ET, TCM).

Stevens was less a cinematic auteur than the ultimate golden-age Hollywood craftsman, which becomes clear as successive April Monday nights move through genre after genre. Look for sentimental stories like Alice Adams and I Remember Mama (April 12), social dramas like The Diary of Anne Frank and A Place in the Sun (April 19), and deft comedy and music in my favorite lineup wrapping up Stevens month.

Saving the liveliest for last, April 26 brings the sparkling and sexy '40s Jean Arthur double feature of The More the Merrier (with Joel McCrea and Charles Coburn) and The Talk of the Town (with Cary Grant and Ronald Colman), with the Hepburn-Tracy gem Woman of the Year and the Astaire-Rogers musical Swing Time. There's even a repeat of A Filmmaker's Journey, saluting all the month's pleasures as the Stevens tribute concludes April 26. Check out the full lineup here.

Also in April, Robert Taylor is honored as TCM's star of the month. The channel goes 'round the clock on Tuesday nights with 54 of the dashing leading man's 1930s-60s credits.

Taylor's celebrated good looks took him through romances of both the present and past variety (April 6's Magnificent Obsession, Camille opposite Greta Garbo, and Waterloo Bridge), war and crime (April 13's High Wall, Stand by for Action and Johnny Eager), period epics (April 20's Quo Vadis and Ivanhoe), sweeping adventures (April 27's Savage Pampas and Killers of Kilimanjaro), westerns, suspense and more. Review the entire lineup of TCM Taylor titles here.

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CONFESSION: The guy I want to be

April 1, 2010 9:45 PM

Not that I want to be a guy, but I do want to be as smart as my favorite TV blogger, Jaime Weinman. Or should I say, as observant -- Jaime elucidates things in shows, in trends, in tropes, even in shot styles and set design, that I just kick myself for not being able to address as clearly.

(Notice how I said "address." Like I see all the same things, but just can't write as articulately about them. Right.)

Take a look at Jaime's current TV Guidance home page at Macleans.ca (the preeminent Canadian news magazine). Here's what he's been writing about in just the last week alone:

• The effectiveness of sitcom set design (major reference: NewsRadio).


• The awesome "nasty" branding of Fox News (major reference: snide press release about LL Cool J objecting to having an earlier unrelated interview inserted into Sarah Palin's show).


• David Mills, death of the great Homicide/The Corner/NYPD Blue writer (leading to a larger riff on writers' sensibility and one-show-at-a-time exclusivity).


• Bad sitcoms within a sitcom (video embed of Newhart's late-run plot where Stephanie stars as twins in "Seein' Double").


• Breaking Bad's brilliant/thrifty use of master shots (digressed into actors who direct themselves, then actors who avoid typecasting, with an admirable shout-out to Ray Romano and Everybody Loves Raymond being seriously underrated).


• Truth in TV two-parter -- How 24 was canceled as a secret provision of the health care bill, then how Chloe Sevigny is now trying not to have said that Big Love's recent season sucked.


• Betty White -- Why? Why now? Why not? (digressing into why her post Mary Tyler Moore sitcom didn't work for being too nice and being shot on videotape where earlier MTM studio gems were on film).


• Bones and escapism, and why viewers actually want shows that confront our real-life problems.

That's one week, people. And I've only scratched the surface of the glued-to-the-tube smarts in these amazing posts.

I am in awe. I am humbled. I am so frickin' jealous, I can't believe I'm even sending you to his site.

But go there. Go now. Read these, and read more.

And then come back here. Please. We really are trying to keep up with him.

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