DVD Releases: September 9, 2005


	Garbo: The Signature Collection If only today's crop of young celebrities were as committed to their privacy as Greta Garbo, the enigmatic Swedish actress who once said she just wanted to be left alone, and actually meant it. To mark the 100th anniversary of her birth, Warners is releasing Garbo: The Signature Collection, which includes Anna Christie, Mata Hari, Grand Hotel, Queen Christina, Anna Karenina, Camille and Ninotchka, along with two discs of silent features and a documentary on her life. The titles are among the most enjoyable and enduring in the history of the cinema, and Garbo proves emphatically what all the fuss was about. Typically, the restorations are superb, and extras are well worth watching. Among them are a 9-minute excerpt from the lost 1928 silent, The Divine Woman; an alternate ending on The Temptress; and commentary by historians Barry Paris, Mark A. Vieira, Tony Maietta and Jeffrey Vance. Even at $100, it's a bargain. -- Gary Dretzka

	Lipstick & Dynamite: The First Ladies of Wrestling Consider this: the Fabulous Moolah (a.k.a., Lillian Ellison), held the title of women's professional wrestling champion, on and off, from 1956 to 1985. Even after losing the crown -- on MTV, to a wrestler managed by Cyndi Lauper -- the sixty-something grappler continued to prowl the squared-circle as a promoter, manager, teacher and living legend. Moolah is at the center of Ruth Leitman's disarming documentary, Lipstick & Dynamite: The First Ladies of Wrestling -- along with fellow hall-of-famer, the Great Mae Young, Ella Waldek and Gladys "Killem" Gillem -- which traces the history of women's wrestling in America (Young actually wrestled for her high school team, with and against boys). In addition to being extremely entertaining, Lipstick & Dynamite argues convincingly that the lady wrestlers' struggle for parity was no different than those of women in any other walk of life. If the women profiled by Leitman were just starting their careers, they'd be accorded all the privileges of contemporary superstardom, including Playboy covers, ancillary video deals and access to health benefits. The extras expand on the material covered in the film. -- Gary Dretzka Digital Nation: It’s probably foolhardy to apply Jungian theory -- or the lyrics to a song by Police, for that matter -- to the less-than-cerebral realms of professional wrestling, magazine publishing and movie marketing. Besides synchronicity, however, what else explains the coincidental appearances this month of Ruth Leitman’s documentary on women’s wrestling, Lipstick and Dynamite; World Wrestling Entertainment’s new DVD, Viva Las Divas; and the WWE’s newest superstar, Christy Hemme, on the cover of Playboy?

Trailer	3-Iron As there are almost no words spoken in this hypnotic little love story from South Korea, subtitle-phobic Americans -- especially those with an inclination for offbeat indie flicks -- have no excuse for not giving it a spin on their DVD players. Produced, written and directed by Kim Ki-Duk, who also made the splendid drama of spiritual enlightenment, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter ... and Spring, 3-Iron follows a pensive young drifter who's adept at breaking into the homes of vacationing strangers. His troubles begin when he rescues a similarly quiet and gentle woman from her abusive husband, and she joins him in his nightly search for comfort, shelter and sustenance. Not surprisingly, as 3-Iron is only 87 minutes long, it doesn't take long before the couple lets their guard down long enough to be caught by police (who find it difficult to hold them for anything more than the break-ins, in which nothing was stolen or vandalized). The title comes from the wraith-like transient's zen-release of choice, which involves practicing his short game in unusual places. For some reason, 3-Iron reminded me of Memento,' although more for its haunting tone and mysterious protagonist than anything than that occurs on-screen. While I can't entirely recommend it to fans of Tin Cup and Dead Solid Perfect, others need be only slightly more adventurous to enjoy the consistently surprising and challenging 3-Iron. . -- Gary Dretzka

Toy Story: 10th Anniversary Edition You can almost set your watch -- or, at least, its calendar element -- to the re-release patterns of classic children's movies. This being 2005, it must be time for a new DVD incarnation of Toy Story. In this case, it's the Toy Story: 10th Anniversary Edition, which represents a repackaging of Ultimate Toy Box, which, in 2000, helped legitimize the concept of reissuing DVDs in bonus-laden, multi-disc, interactive packages, in the first place. New here are a pair of retrospectives, a game, a Pixar preview reel and upgraded audio and video tracks. -- Gary Dretzka

TV-to-DVD Lost: The Complete First Season Petticoat Junction: Ultimate Collection The Beverly Hillbillies: Ultimate Collection Nero Kingdom Hospital It's a safe bet that ABC brass didn't know what they had on their hands last year with Lost, a midweek series that threw the kitchen sink against the wall, and, somehow, it stuck. Mixed metaphors aside, the creators of the survival soap opera did seem to cast an unusually wide thematic net, borrowing freely from such contemporary influences as Cast Away and Jurassic Park; Gilligan's Island, Survivor and The X-Files; and Maxim magazine. Lost documents what might happen if a plane crashed on a tropical island, where mystery abounds and clothing is optional. Of the 48 survivors, the show's cameras follow the exploits of 14 of the most diverse and telegenic among them. The extreme adventures and weekly cliffhangers lent themselves perfectly not only to morning-after conversations over the water cooler, but all manner of post-show Internet activity. Can it stay hot in the 2005-06 season? Stay tuned. Long before there was a cheesy restaurant chain named Hooters, there was Hooterville. Although comparisons can be made between the waitresses of the former and several of the lovelier residents of the latter, none will appear here. Hooterville was the TV home of Petticoat Junction, a country cousin to Paul Hennig's similarly successful The Beverly Hillbillies and Green Acres. As cornball as these shows were, they enjoyed long runs and loyal followings. Henning's place in the sitcom Pantheon was further assured by his work as a writer and/or producer for such entertainments as The Bob Cummings Show, The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show and The Real McCoys. The boxed set features 20 restored episodes, complete with the original theme song. It also contains an introduction by Linda Kaye Henning (who played Betty Joe Bradley); a documentary, The History of Paul Henning and Hooterville,; cast interviews; and network promos and cast commercials. What, no model trains? The surviving Hennings have also authorized the release, on September 27, of the first volume of The Beverly Hillbillies: Ultimate Collection. It consists of 26 newly restored and unedited episodes, with the original opening and closing theme songs (missing or butchered in previous DVD releases), the never-before-broadcast pilot (The Hillbillies of Beverly Hills), cast commercials, interviews and behind-the-scenes footage from the Hennings estate. The Beverly Hillbillies should never be confused with Shakespeare, but I'd put these original episodes up against most of the sitcoms currently on the air, without hesitation or embarrassment. The only thing missing in these two packages is the communal Christmas episode, which will be released separately, in October. Nero (a.k.a., Imperium: Nerone) represents the second in a six-part series of long-form historical (more or less) dramas made originally for European television. It didn't find a whole lot of traction in the marketplace there, but it could attract takers in its DVD incarnation here, if only among those younger viewers whose parents won't let them watch Rome, on HBO. (Who knew that bikini waxing was so popular among Caesar's gal pals?) Made at a fraction of the cost of that epic mini-series, Nero is pretty much your standard period soaper, and really isn't in the same league as Rome, I, Claudius, Empire or Gladiator, which begs the question of why anyone still would bother to try. The Imperium series will continue with Titus, Marcus Aurelius, Costantinus and The Fall of the Roman Empire. Clearly, there's still a lot of life left in the sword-and-sandals genre. Last year's super-duper boxed set of Stephen King's Kingdom Hospital, like all of Gaul, has been divided into three parts (sorry, we've got Caesar on the brain). The first segment, The Beginning arrives this week; the second, Making the Rounds will be released on September 27; and, Post Mortem drops on October 11. Based on Danish director Lars Von Trier's cult mini-series, The Kingdom, it's the story of a hospital in Maine built on the site of a mill fire that killed most of its young occupants. It's spooky enough, but the really creepy part comes in knowing that the cost of the series, bought a la carte, is more than that of original box, which came complete with bonus features. Funny how that works. -- Gary Dretzka

Cirque du Soleil: Midnight Sun This entertaining DVD reminds of what could happen if the Playboy Jazz Festival ever were to merge its empire with that of Cirque du Soleil. Not only would the Hollywood Bowl come alive with the sound of music, but the venue's stage and aisles would overflow with stilt-walkers, tumblers, acrobats, clowns and other trademark entertainments. Cirque du Soleil: Midnight Sun is a high-def recording of the summer night in Montreal when 250 members of the troupe descended on the heart of the city to join forces with musicians gathered for the Montreal Jazz Festival. (It also marked Cirque's 20th birthday.) Cirque loyalists will recognize many of the acts and routines, but there's enough new here to hold the attention of longtime fans and newcomers, alike. The event used 3 stages, 14 cameras and 10 giant screens, and was witnessed by 200,000 spectators. Also shown performing are Senegalese singer Youssou N'Dour and Brazilian singer Daniela Mercury. -- Gary Dretzka

Oldies But Goodies To Kill a Mockingbird: Legacy Series Edition The Deer Hunter: Legacy Series Edition The Sting: Legacy Series Edition Four Friends The Morning After Inserts With the passing last month of Brock Peters, who played the falsely accused rapist in To Kill a Mockingbird, this week's re-release of the classic courtroom drama carries with it some additional emotional weight. Long used by teachers as a companion piece to Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, as a tool in the teaching of tolerance and justice, this bonus-rich Legacy Series Edition of Robert Mulligan's Best Picture nominee will help add context to any class screening. In addition to previously available commentary by Mulligan and producer Alan Pakula, and interviews with Gregory Peck and Robert Duvall, the Legacy edition includes the making-of documentary, Fearful Symmetry, and the feature-length video biography, A Conversation with Gregory Peck. The hosannas continue with Peck's acceptance speech, as winner of the 1963 Best Actor Oscar, excerpts from the AFI Life Achievment Award ceremony and featurette, Academy Tribute to Gregory Peck. Also benefiting from Legacy Series makeovers are Best Picture winners The Deer Hunter and The Sting. Released in 1978, Michael Cimino's closely observed drama was the first Hollywood movie to examine how a tour in Vietnam, under extreme conditions, might have impacted a close-knit group of Average Joes from blue-collar America. Because Cimino introduced the likable young men before they left for the war, we empathized with their individual struggles more than we might have had we first came upon them in boot camp or in-country. That we've also shared happy times with their families and friends, the poignancy of their tortuous coming-of-age becomes a shared experience. To some, Cimino's use of the Russian-roulette game, as a metaphor for the insanity of the war, was so far over the top that it detracted from the very real drama surrounding the difficulties faced by the friends when they returned home, and were expected to be whole and unaffected. To others, though, the madness witnessed in those scenes struck just the right chord. The Legacy edition has been digitally re-mastered, and given a fresh audio track. Disc 2 adds deleted and extended scenes to the commentary of cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond and journalist Bob Fisher. When anyone over 40 says, They don't make movies like they used to, you can bet they're referring to pictures like The Sting, in which everything that's good about the Hollywood studio process came together in the right proportions and at the right times. Every penny seemed well spent, and the story was a involving as any novel. Would George Roy Hill's intricately choreographed caper have been nearly as terrific an entertainment if it had paired someone other than Paul Newman and Robert Redford in the lead roles? Close, but probably not AS good. Harnessing star power in the service of a crowd-pleasing story is what Hollywood used to be about, too. The Legacy edition has been re-mastered, restored and given a fresh digital retuning. Disc 2 adds a feature-length The Art of the Sting, which dissects the movie through the eyes of the stars and filmmakers, and discusses where it fits in the history of Hollywood studio films. In the early- to mid-'80s, Steve Tesich was one of Hollywood's most prolific and valued writers of films intended for general consumption. Breaking Away, his wonderful story of bicyclists-out-of-water, class struggle and unlikely romance, set the table for such high-profile projects as Eyewitness, The World According to Garp, American Flyers and Eleni. It was in the coming-of-age drama, Four Friends, however, that the Yugoslavian immigrant delivered his most personal statement on the American dream. More autobiographical than anyone really knew at the time, it followed the journey of four working-class kids from an Indiana high school, through the tumult of the '60s and to a reunion 10 years after they went their separate ways. Four Friends was at once hugely personal, deeply moving, funny and far too ambitious. Audiences came out of it feeling as if they had just completed some kind of emotional marathon. Arthur Penn kept the unwieldy story moving, though, and, in hindsight, Four Friends reflects an intellectual intensity sorely missing in today's movies. Nineteen years after The Morning After was released, with a small fraction of the hoopla that surrounded Monster-in-Law, it's easy to see why Jane Fonda's absence left such a deep void in Hollywood. She would only appear in four movies between then and now, and no one quite took her place. Had she not become Mrs. Ted Turner, of course, there probably wouldn't have been many decent roles for her to play, anyway … so, waiting two decades for the opportunity to play opposite J-Lo might not have been such a bad idea. Here, she plays a washed-up actress and black-out drunk, who, one morning, wakes up next to a guy with a knife buried deep in his chest. Jeff Bridges is the emotionally damaged ex-cop who arrives in the nick of time, and joins the growing mystery surrounding the murder. Sidney Lumet, who's as New York as they come, makes many interesting choices in his depiction of a sun-bleached Los Angeles, in which pretty pastels camouflage some very dark motivations. The extras include commentary by Fonda and Lumet. n the documentary Inside Deep Throat, Gerard Damiano recalls a time when people in the porn industry actually thought Hollywood would warm to the idea hiring directors and actors who weren't afraid of going hard-core when a script warranted it. Although a few stars of adult movies were able to find work in such legit features as 10 and 52-Pickup, the closest any studio came to the Full Monty was the long-forgotten, Inserts. In it, a pre-Jaws Richard Dreyfuss portrayed a director known simply as the Boy Wonder, whose career -- like the voice of his current leading lady, Harlene (bravely played by Veronica Cartwright) -- didn't survive the transition from silent films to talkies. To make ends meet, and afford their addictions, Harlene and the Boy Wonder collaborate on stag films. Less was left to the imagination in the first five minutes of Inserts than in the whole of Boogie Nights, but the staginess of the picture failed to rouse much of a response from critics or audiences. As far as I can tell, Inserts was never made available on VHS, and its sudden arrival in the DVD marketplace should be of interest to any student of films made in the days when tent poles still were the things that propped up circus tents, not studios. That said, however, John Byrum's film remains a slight piece … more a two-act play than a movie, and one that only comes alive in the last 45 minutes. Still, the willingness of its stars to appear in such a project speaks volumes about the period. Look for a very young Bob Hoskins in the role of the heroin-dispensing producer, and a similarly courageous Jessica Harper as his adventurous moll, Cathy Cake. -- Gary Dretzka

The Prophecy The Prophecy: Forsaken The Prophecy 3: The Ascent Hellraiser:Hellworld Nowadays, for a horror franchise to succeed, it has to be able to flourish in the increasingly lucrative straight-to-DVD marketplace. Typically, any new grotesquely made-up monster and deformed sociopath is introduced to the fan boys and plasma geeks first on the big screen, with the benefit of a decent publicity and advertising campaign. Because budgets for sequels are miniscule, compared to those reserved for the originals, they are required to ride that buzz into the video afterlife. And, a picture doesn't necessarily have to be a blockbuster to warrant a sequel, or five … just a great villain. It helps, of course, if one or two of the original stars can be retained, and the name of the creator can be used as a teaser in later marketing campaigns. As the fallen angel Gabriel, the great Christopher Walken was a fixture for the first three installments of the Prophecy series, which, with Forsaken now is into its fifth incarnation. It features Jason Scott Lee, along with Kari Wuhrer and Doug Bradley from Prophecy: Uprising. Walken is represented in The Prophesy and Prophesy 3: The Ascent, also arriving this week. Bradley returns this week, as well, in Hellworld, the latest video sequel in the venerable Hellraiser series. The Liverpool native, a close friend of series creator Clive Barker, has made a career out of playing the cenobite, Pinhead, a demon who thrives on the giving and taking of pain. In Hellworld, a group of young video-gamers are invited to a party thrown by a website. Naturally, the gamers become the game. -- Gary Dretzka

The Stranger Wore a Gun In Mel Brooks' uproarious parody of Hollywood westerns, Blazing Saddles, the citizens of Rock Ridge would form a heavenly chorus every time the name of cowboy hero Randolph Scott was invoked. Why Scott and not John Wayne, Gary Cooper or, for that matter, Gabby Hayes? The reference meant almost nothing to the Baby Boomers who helped make Blazing Saddles such a hit -- if, in large part, for its fart jokes -- and, no doubt, the reference has been lost on generations that followed. That lapse in collective memory can be attributed largely to the star's decision to retire at what some would consider to be the pinnacle of his career -- after the release of Ride the High Country -- and stay retired for the next 25 years. But, Scott was the real deal, a cowboy hero with a horse, Stardust, that was as famous as Trigger, Silver or Champion. The Stranger Wore a Gun arrives in DVD along with a half-dozen oaters from the barn of Columbia Pictures. Originally shot in 3-D -- a western in 3-D ... why? -- the movie pales in comparison to the films Scott made with director Budd Boetticher. Nonetheless, fans of old-school westerns will be happy to see it arrive finally in DVD, along with Man in the Saddle, Santa Fe, Ten Wanted Men, A Lawless Street, The Desperadoes and, from Lions Gate, Wagon Wheels. (Also new is Anthony Mann's The Last Frontier, with Robert Preston, Guy Madison, Anne Bancroft and Victor Mature.) With the Sam Peckinpah-directed Ride the High Country and several of the Boetticher films, including Comanche Station and The Tall T, as yet available in DVD, there's plenty more to look forward to from the vaults of Columbia Pictures. -- Gary Dretzka

The Bela Lugosi Collection Hammer Horror Series If any one genre has benefited more than others from the explosively positive response to the re-emergence of vintage films in the DVD marketplace, it's horror. Apart from a handful of classic titles, creature-features were among the first to be butchered for television, and tortured by the crappy projectors used by cost-obsessed exhibitors during monster marathons and kiddie matinees. Nothing much was done to improve them in the 20 years that VHS was the dominant video format. Those who greeted Universal's Monster Legacy Collections with waves of excitement and a cloudburst of credit-card transactions will likely be the same fans who will rush out to purchase its similarly valuable Bela Lugosi Collection. New to DVD are Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Black Cat, The Raven, The Invisible Ray and Black Friday, in which Lugosi mostly played mad scientists and demented doctors. The films also feature memorable performances by Boris Karloff. Decades later, when American studios began turning away from horror and embracing science-fiction, it was left to the Brits to supply fans of the genre with their fix of monsters and madmen. What Universal was in the '30s and '40s, Hammer Studios became in the '60s, with its own versions of the Frankenstein, Dracula and Wolfman sagas (carefully avoiding lawsuits by making sure its monsters didn't resemble Universal's), and by developing its own roster of stars. This four-sided package is the third DVD compilation of Hammer horror classics (the previous two came from Warners, and many individual titles are available through Anchor Bay ). The titles include Brides of Dracula, Curse of the Werewolf, Phantom of the Opera, Paranoiac, Kiss of the Vampire, Nightmare, Night Creatures and Evil of Frankenstein, and some nifty performances by Peter Cushing, Oliver Reed and Herbert Lom. -- Gary Dretzka

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