DVD

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Roseanne: The Complete Seventh Season

Perhaps I give it too much credit because I grew up with Roseanne, But I have always found it to be the most singularly astute lower-middle-class sitcom America has ever been provided – call it the Waiting For Godot of the trailer park circuit. This seventh season box set continues to enthrall.I’ll be the first to admit that this seventh go-round of the series is definitely past its prime; there are only so many times the Conner kids can move in and move out of the house before the...

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Brute Force

The movie that started an astonishing string of five noir classics from director Jules Dassin, Brute Force is one hell of a prison picture. Dassin would reach higher cinematic elevations with his following works The Naked City, Thieves Highway, Night and the City and Rififi. But Brute Force remains a striking achievement, a movie that both follows the rubric of noir cine-rhetoric and offers an exceptional subtext that even today plays as wildly (and noticeably) symbolic. The film is a will- they...

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Jonestown: The Life and Death of the People’s Temple

Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple is a riveting account of how Jim Jones duped a willing audience into a 1978 mass suicide that claimed over 900 victims. Nelson tells his story the right way: there are no experts or doctors or other talking heads of academia. Instead, he’s gathered an articulate gallery of survivors who managed to shake Jones’ influence at the very last moment. Combined with rare footage shot at Jonestown (Jones’ Guyana compound) the day of the...

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The Streets of San Francisco: Season 1 – Vol. 1

The Streets of San Francisco offers textbook television detective fare that is both rewarding and sometimes redundant. This long-running detective drama, about two detectives on the beat in the city by the bay doing everything in their plaid-panted power to put bad guys behind bars, is effortlessly engaging television. But while it’s obvious the show has had a penetrating influence on modern hour-long boob tube programming, it’s an easier show to appreciate than it is to actually like...

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Bobby

I first saw Bobby in a screening room in Beverly Hills. The small theater was so crowded they had to bring in chairs from another room to accommodate everyone; as someone who had once watched an entire film standing up, I was glad to have arrived early enough to snag a comfy seat. When the film ended, the older people in the room were in tears. However, I’m not sure they were crying over the movie, as much as they were crying over the actual event the film dramatizes.That event is the 1968...

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Requiem

You may not believe in the Devil and you may not believe in exorcisms, but you will believe that there’s something very wrong with Michaela Klinger (the fantastic Sandra Huller) in Requiem. The film is based on the true story that also inspired last year’s American-made hit The Exorcism of Emily Rose. But while these two films are inspired by the same source, they could not be more different. Emily Rose is a good film, but it’s typical of a Hollywood production: its interest in...

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The Heiress

The Heiress fully deserves the “classic” label that time has chosen to bestow. This 1949 marvel comes just a few years after Olivia de Havilland’s 1946 masterpiece To Each His Own (my favorite classic which still has yet to find its way to DVD), and marks a strong companion; Havilland’s ability to reveal transformative emotional energy is capitalized in this powerful story. The screenplay is based on a stage play that Havilland saw performed in New York which comes through...

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Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind - HD DVD

French music video director Michel Gondry has done the impossible, something that not even Peter Weir or Milos Forman could manage. He has elicited a fully sympathetic, engaging and even nuanced dramatic performance from Jim Carrey. The rubber-faced comedian has tried his hand at serious drama a few times before, usually either unable to suppress his obnoxious tendencies or (much like Robin Williams) going overboard by confusing somber rigidity with subtlety. It is truly amazing, therefore, that...

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Pan’s Labyrinth - 2-Disc Platinum Edition

Guillermo del Toro, who in 2004 did such an effective job bringing Hellboy to the big screen, has fashioned a film deeply rooted in misogyny, myths, and mysticism. The story is constructed as two parallel tales. One is in the real world: the brutal world of Fascist Spain in 1944. The other exists in a magical kingdom that exists far below our feet. It’s never made clear whether the mythical realm is an escapist figment of the imagination of an emotionally stressed...

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Fletch : The Jane Doe Edition

To publicly admit thinking Chevy Chase is funny is like admitting to a fondness for Toto’s “Africa” album or, maybe, borscht. There’s really no justification for it; you just have to embrace it and face the social consequences. Well, I for one think Chevy Chase is funny. Granted, he’s not funny anymore. He’s a bit ornery when interviewed, and young audiences see him as “the guy from that show who did some movies, but now he’s old and looks like my...

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The Panic in Needle Park

Before Jerry Schatzberg’s 1971 drama The Panic in Needle Park I thought addicts were addicted to drugs. And while that’s true, top-billed Al Pacino and Kitty Winn made me realize that addicts are also addicted to other addicts. Bobby (Pacino) and Helen (Winn) need each other as much as they need heroin. Their relationship has the same signs of co-dependency and withdrawal that are hallmarks of abuse. The pair waste their days in Needle Park, the corner of Broadway and 72nd Street...

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Dinosaurs: The Complete Third and Fourth Seasons

As a viewer, I have no problem with politics. If you have a philosophical or administrative perspective, show it to me. Let me know what you think. I may not agree with you, but in this increasingly litigious information age, it’s becoming more and more important to me as a devourer of culture (and an American, if you really want to get into it) that people get a chance to speak their minds and broadcast the kinds of ideas that really get them flying. The good news is that Dinosaurs &ndash...

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Planet Earth: The Complete BBC Series

Believe the hype: It’s that good. I remember seeing a couple of ads for Planet Earth on The Discovery Channel; watched in a cursory fashion, the multi-part documentary looks like just another ‘ooo! look at the animals!’ piece that The Discovery Channel airs with their usual frequency. But it takes less than five minutes of viewing to cement Planet Earth as one of the most visually appealing documentaries to ever have hit television sets: It’s a bona fide classic.If there...

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Miami Vice: Season Three/Season Four

This writer is coming at Miami Vice ***-backwards – let me just get that out of the way up front. This is not one of those reviews where a writer waxes eloquent about how much he loved a show back in the day and whether it holds up today: Simply stated, I had never seen Miami Vice (the TV show) until these two box sets came my way. But I have seen Miami Vice the movie five times.I can almost hear old-school Miami Vice fans groaning through the ether…Because, to my eyes, Colin Farrell...

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Full House: The Complete Sixth Season

I specifically remember making time in my schedule (as did my cousins and friends) to have butt on floor in front of the TV in time for TGIF to start each Friday night. Family Matters may have been good and Perfect Strangers may have been great, but Full House was also a standard, and I went out of my way never to miss it. Was it a good show? Hell, no. Did it ever have even the most moderate sheen of being anything more than a pitifully cheesy, outrageously saccharine excuse to have characters...