DVD Releases: July 7, 2005


	Dear Frankie US/Canada Gross - $1.34 million In Dear Frankie, the always reliable Emily Mortimer plays the Scottish mother of 9-year-old boy, whose deafness is a constant reminder of an abusive husband she's spent years trying to avoid. Rather than risk Frankie's psychological well-being with the truth about his parentage, Lizzie allows her son to think daddy's off on some grand nautical adventure, and is reachable only through the mail. Lizzie maintains the ruse by penning the father's side of the correspondence, and affixing stamps from far-away nations on the envelopes. As fate would have it, a vessel bearing the name of dad's fantasy freighter steams into the local port, raising Frankie's hopes of a happy reunion. Lizzie elects to rent the services of a handsome stranger -- Gerard Butler's character is actually credited as the Stranger -- to spend a day with her son. From that description, alone, anyone movie-savvy enough to have a subscription to Netflix probably would anticipate an ending that ends "and they lived happily ever after." Dear Frankie, not being a product of Hollywood, offers several nice surprises along the way, however. Shona Auerbach's first feature easily fits most definitions of chick flick, but the Kleenex-inducing moments are infrequent, and none will cause manly-men to run screaming out of the living room in fear of losing their manhood. *-- Gary Dretzka*


	The Pornographer Among the many fantasies advanced in Boogie Nights and Inside Deep Throat was the one in which actors and directors imagined a day when mainstream studios would embrace graphic sexuality, thereby allowing them to go legit on their own terms. That conceit seems almost laughably quaint at a time when Hollywood is more genitalia-phobic than ever before. Michael Winterbottom's 9 Songs is the latest film to attempt to bridge the gap crossed previously by Catherine Breillat, Patrice Chéreau, Virginie Despentes, Nagisa Oshima and Bernardo Bertolucci. Somehow, the marriage of popcorn and porn (a.k.a., more-or-less realistic depictions of human sexuality in action) has yet to bear fruit. In Bertrand Bonello's The Pornographer, Jean-Pierre Leaud played a veteran director of adult films, who comes out of 20 years of retirement to direct an artsy-fartsy porno not unlike the work of stylish work of Andrew Blake. Like directors Gerard Damiano (Deep Throat) and the fictional Jack Horner (Boogie Nights), Leaud's Jacques Laurent came into the business in the wake of the '60s, when sexual liberation was as important a cause as any other. Forty years later, Laurent is an angst-ridden has-been struggling to come to grips with personal financial woes, budget constraints, lessened artistic standards, the ravages of age and an estranged son. Leaud's distress feels real, and The Pornographer asks questions that deserve to be answered. While Americans continue to insist that sex must be played for laughs and cheap morality lessons, or not at all, the French have found ways to treat this aspect of the human condition with sobriety and respect. It may not always work as art, but, at least, it's something to hide in a corner. Not surprisingly, The Pornographer only was shown in the U.S. at a film festival frequented by Francophiles. -- Gary Dretzka


	Bride and Prejudice US/Canada Gross - $6.6 million I'm guessing that the backers of Bride & Prejudice had some pretty high hopes for Gurinder Chadha's music-filled romantic comedy, which combined all the flashy exuberance of a Bollywood production with Jane Austen's sly view of human nature. Chadha was coming off Bend It Like Beckham, after all, and it featured India's most popular actress, Aishwarya Rai (who makes most Hollywood ingénues look like your run-of-the-mill contestant on The Bachelor). Better, yet, it was more than an hour shorter than most Bollywood extravaganzas. That it didn't really translate all that well at the box-office here is hardly a great mystery, though. Besides our over-familiarization with the source material, there was the increasingly tiresome depiction of Indian mothers obsessing over their daughters' rejection of traditional match-making practices. As cliches go, this one definitely has run its course. Nonetheless, Bride & Prejudice is harmless fun, more appropriate for romance-starved teenagers than anyone else. The movie also looks great, as it bounces back and forth from Amritsar, Goa, London and Beverly Hills. As a beginner's guide to Bollywood, you could do a lot worse. -- Gary Dretzka


	The Good Father A good half-dozen years before Dr. Hannibal Lecter would make liver, fava beans and a nice Chianti a punch line for gourmands around the globe, Anthony Hopkins turned in a similarly chilling portrayal of an embittered divorced man, in Mike Newell's The Good Father. Looking very much like one of those working-class ruffians in a British New Wave movie, Hopkins' Bill Hooper is the highly recognizable victim of a marriage that started out OK in the wake of the idealistic '60s, but went horribly wrong during pitiless reign of Margaret Thatcher (although a similar pairing might just as easily have gone sour today, under Tony Blair). Still tortured by the loss of his son in a custody battle, Hooper volunteers to help a friend who is being sued for divorce by his wife, so that she can move to Australia with their son and her lesbian lover. The result is a take-no-prisoners courtroom battle that soils everyone involved. The drama may be too intense for casual living-room viewing on DVD, but Hopkins' performance is absolutely riveting. Also terrific are stars-to-be Jim Broadbent, Simon Callow, Miriam Margolyes and Joanne Whalley. -- Gary Dretzka

Prozac Nation Prozac Nation has been sitting on a shelf at Miramax for almost four years, and is only seeing the light of day now, presumably, because Disney is anxious to clear its warehouse of inventory with little commercial potential. Neither too awful to qualify as camp, nor good enough be awarded even a perfunctory theatrical release, Erik Skjoldbjærg's adaptation of Elizabeth Wurtzel's best-seller is just the kind of wasted effort that plays best at 11 p.m. on Cinemax. (Yes, a perfectly cast Christina Ricci briefly and uncharacteristically appears sans clothes, thus instantly qualifying Prozac Nation for that timeslot.) Perhaps, too, America wasn't ready for another movie about clinical depression and obsessive pill-popping among pampered Ivy Leaguers … a sub-genre to which Prozac Nation adds little. Or, maybe, Wurtzel's dopey commentary on the events of 9/11 -- which coincided with the Toronto Film Festival screening of the movie -- had inspired feelings of dread among the Weinsteins and Disney. (And, this was after the movie had garnered some decent reviews.) Any way one looks at it, though, Prozac Nation wasn't worth all the fuss and bother that kept it from being shown, a decision that didn't do a talented director like Skjoldbjærg (Insomnia) any good. Not surprisingly, the extras are nothing to write home about, either. -- Gary Dretzka

Film Noir Classic Collection: Volume 2 The titles in Warners' new five-disc box of hard-bitten treats, Film Noir Classic Collection: Volume 2, may not be as familiar as those in the first edition -- heck, one or two barely qualify as noir -- but they're every bit as entertaining. Indeed, Born to Kill, Clash by Night, Crossfire, Dillinger and The Narrow Margin almost defined what it meant to be a B-movie, at a time when double-features were routine occurrences. Here, again, each film is expertly restored and accompanied by expert commentary from such talents as Robert Wise, Peter Bogdanovich, Fritz Lang, Edward Dmytryk, John Milius, William Friedkin and Richard Fleischer. The casts also represent a who's who of actors associated with noir, including Barbara Stanwyck, Claire Trevor, Robert Ryan and Robert Mitchum. Lawrence Tierney starred in Dillinger, which had to be made at B-studio Monogram, because, we're told, the Hayes Code forbade major studios from glorifying criminals. -- Gary Dretzka

Point Blank When Donald E. Westlake writes novels in the voice of Richard Stark, loyal readers know to expect a pretty rough and bloody ride. In Point Blank, one of the cinema's greatest tough guys, Lee Marvin, played Stark's human killing machine, Parker (a.k.a. Walker). Fresh out of Alcatraz, he's seeking revenge on the mobsters and molls who stiffed him out of the $93,000 he had coming from a heist … nothing more, nothing less. John Boorman's neo-noir classic was adapted from Stark's freshman novel, The Hunter, which also provided the source material in 1999 for Payback, starring Mel Gibson. All Brian Helgeland's noisy re-make proved was that, while Gibson may be able to take and throw a punch, he's no match for Lee Marvin. But, then, who is? The 1967 version also features terrific performances by Angie Dickinson, Keenan Wynn and Carroll O'Connor, while Alcatraz has never looked more portentous. Among the extras is commentary by Boorman and Steven Soderbergh, and the vintage making-of featurette, The Rock. -- Gary Dretzka


Fantastic Four: The Complete Animated Series With Tim Story's big-screen adaptation of yet another Marvel Comics classic series on tap for Friday, fans likely will want to check out Fantastic Four: The Complete Animated Series. The 26-episode series, which lasted only two years on television in the mid-'90s, can serve as a primer on the origins of the Fantastic Four, and their struggles against Doctor Doom and his legion of villains. Naturally, Stan Lee's around to make the introductions. -- Gary Dretzka

Roughnecks: The Starship Troopers Chronicles Roughnecks: The Starship Troopers Chronicles took the opposite route, migrating from the big to the small screen. Chronicles, which aired originally on the Sci-Fi Channel, is a continuation of the events and characters introduced by Paul Verhooven in his 1997 adaptation of Robert Heinlein's novel. The four-disc Complete Campaigns package includes The Pluto Campaign, The Hydora Campaign, The Tophet Campaign, The Tesca Campaign, The Zephyr Campaign, The Klendathu Campaign, Trackers and The Homefront Campaign, as well as four bonus episodes, illustrations, previews and photo galleries. Yet to arrive on these shores is the anime version of the same story, which was released on video in Japan in 1989, and is supposed to hew a bit closer to Heinlein's World War II-inspired adventure. -- Gary Dretzka

MCN's 2004 DVD Year In Review
Doug Pratt's Ten Best - Multiplatter And Single Platter
Digital Nation: Gary Dretzka's Best DVDs of the Year
Ray Pride's Five Best DVDs And Five Best Boxed Sets