Cynical Cinema

Manda Bala is about corruption and kidnapping and gangs in Brazil.  It’s almost an hour and a half of twenty minutes worth of story.  In point of fact, there is more than enough information out there for a full movie, but not enough people to talk about it.  It begins on a frog farm in Brazil, which is kinf of odd.  There is a lot of talk about frogs, and the farming of said frogs.  Then it moves on to the meat of the movie.  Apparently, there was some scandal involving a frog farm.  We learn about it later.  Apparently, a very high-ranking politician, named Jader Barbalho, installed himself as the overseer of something called “Sudam”, which was a project funded by the government using taxpayer money that was designed to create business and boost the economic situation of the poor parts of Northern Brazil.  Instead of creating business and enterprise, however, Barbalho created fake businesses, over 400 of them, and stole the money.  Over two billion dollars.  And one of the fronts he used to launder the money was a frog farm.  So, there is the loose tie-in to frog farming.

The movie then moves on to kidnapping, which is the major criminal enterprise in Sao Paolo.  At least one person is kidnapped every day in Sao Paolo, because it is easier and more lucrative than robbing banks.  We meet a woman who was kidnapped and had her ear cut off, to be sent along with the ransom note.  This is the persuasion method of choice for kidnappers in Brazil.  We also meet a plastic surgeon, whose business is almost exclusively re-attaching or re-creating ears for kidnapping victims.  And we see a kidnapper cutting off an ear on a tape that he sends along with the ransom.  At least Reservoir Dogs cut away for that scene.  It really is awfully tough to watch, even though it’s grainy and of poor quality.

But what’s really tough to watch is the movie itself.  You have to turn on the subtitles, because a large portion of the film is in Spanish.  But then there are interpreters at various points in the film, which means you get the subtitles, and then you get the English translation which is the same, and the movie drags on for twice as long as is necessary.  The main problem with the film, however, is that no one wants to talk about this stuff.  Understandably, they’re scared, but what it means is that the only people with anything constructive to add are a kidnapper with a hood on his face, a couple of members of the Sao Paolo SWAT team, a kidnap victim and a frog farmer.  So there is very little information actually disseminated in the movie.

What we do learn is that kidnapping and killing are very easy for the people who live in the slums and who would never be able to live with a real job, because their neighbourhoods are so poor.  And corruption is very easy for the people in charge of the government.  This Barbalho was charged with embezzeling two billion dollars, and ended up walking.  And then getting re-elected to congress.  But that’s about all we learn, and it takes way too long.  There are certainly some impressive scenes - the scene where the leader of the SWAT team shows his bullet wounds and scars, a scene where people who have purchased bulletproof cars take a course in defensive driving - how to get away when another car is shooting at you, and a scene where a microchip inventor describes his newest invention - microchips that can be implanted under peoples’ skin so if they are kidnapped their family will know immediately. 

But in the end, this is three different stories, which are tied together clumsily, and have a sort of connection at the end of the film, when the point is made that it is just as easy to steal with a pen as it is with a gun.  And all we really get is a picture of Brazil as a really messed up place to live.  And with interview subjects who refuse to say much, or won’t be identified, there isn’t much story beyond that.  Brazil is certainly not perfect.  Neither is this documentary.

Jonathan Demme will always be known for one thing above all others.  He is the man who directed Silence of the Lambs.  Which, in the world of film, is much like being the guy who wrote The DaVinci Code.  It doesn’t really matter what else you’ve done, or if it’s any good, you’re still that guy.  And Demme has done some other excellent work, like Adaptation and the remake of The Manchurian Candidate.  He has also done some great documentaries, mostly music ones, like Stop Making Sense, about the Talking Heads, and Heart of Gold, the recent excellent film about Neil Young.  And now, he comes out with this terrific documentary about former president Jimmy Carter, Man From Plains.  The movie often makes reference to the fact that Carter is the 39th president.  Why are Americans so crazy about the numbers of their presidents?  We don’t do that here - it took me a long time to figure out what number Prime Minister Stephen Harper was…then I forgot before I came back to writing this review.  All that counting for nothing.

Carter was on The Daily Show last night, promoting his new book about his mom Lillian, “A Remarkable Mother”.  And I was so taken with Carter that I immediately watched Man From Plains the next morning.  And the first person to appear - is Carter’s mom!  On the Johnny Carson show in the late 70s, while her son was president.  Her appearance is awesome - such a funny, engaging elderly woman, and it sets the tone for the entire movie.  Because Carter is a lot like his mom.  He can be funny, he can be entertaining in an elderly, my-grandpa-makes-jokes kind of way, and he is always interesting and very well-informed.  The movie moves on right away to a barbecue near his birthplace where he blesses the meal.  This is one of the few Christian speakers who actually gets his voice heard while not being a total wing-nut.  His blessing is so very American, but good-American.  He prays for the soldiers overseas, and prays for the environment, calling the American people “custodians of the land”, and expressing the hope that they all remember this and work together to save it.

Then the film moves on to the meat of the story.  Carter’s new book (at the time) was called “Palestine:  Peace not Apartheid”.  It was a reference to Israel’s policies in Palestine, which are, in many cases, the same as apartheid, and in some cases worse.  (Apartheid, by the way, has been defined by the UN in the wake of the human rights battle in South Africa, and Palestine certainly qualifies, but people hate using the word to describe anything other than South Africa itself.  It’s would be kind of like people getting angry about the genocide in Rwanda being called a “holocaust”.  No, there was only ONE holocaust, and I’m offended!)  And the controversy over the title and content of the book is the main theme in the documentary.  Carter suggests, early on, that there is absolutely NO degree of objectivity left in the American news media, and watching the film, it seems like a pretty accurate statement.

The basic premise of the book is that in order to broker peace in Israel and Palestine and the Gaza Strip, Israel has to withdraw.  They are keeping the Palestinians behind a wall and enacting very apartheid-sounding laws to keep them opressed.  So his solution seems, on the surface, to be very simple.  Back off.  Let the Palestinians have their land.  Everyone wins.  The controversy arises when the Israelis and their supporters start pointing out the Palestinian acts of terrorism against Israel.  If the people in Gaza are walled in, the Hamas supporters can’t walk into Israel and detonate a suicide bomb.  So, we keep them in their cage so that innocent Israelis are not killed.  Which is an argument that also makes sense.  And while Carter decries the terrorism and suicide bombings in his book, he also says that they are not going to stop as long as their people are being, for all intents and purposes, kept in a cage.  The attacks on Carter become more and more venomous, accusing him of everything to plagiarism to outright lying, to actual anti-semitism.

Carter makes appearances on lots of shows, being interviewed by Jay Leno, Al Franken, Larry King, and the always-irritating Wolf Blitzer.  Callers ask him questions on radio programs, questions that boggle my mind - why were you such a sissy over the Iran hostage affair?  Why didn’t you bomb the s*** out of Iran then?  Wouldn’t we have a better relationship with Iran today if you had done that?  And Carter’s response is remarkably controlled, given the question.  Who still thinks this way?  Does this caller really think that thirty years from now, the U.S. will have an excellent relationship with Iraq?  Because they have destroyed it now?  Bonkers.  And what’s more bonkers is that you get the sense from peoples’ reactions, that had he come out totally one-sided on the Israel-Palestine issue, and it had been against Palestine, there would have been almost no controversy at all.  The U.S. has chosen a side already.  It is Israel.  And nothing more can be said on the subject.  Except, of course, when you are Jimmy Carter.

 Jimmy Carter is a wonderful man, a man who may well be doing more for America and the world after his presidency than he did while he was still commander-in-chief.  He’s 84 years old, he just celebrated his sixtieth wedding anniversary, and he is still making the rounds of talk shows, doing countless interviews, and working harder than maybe anyone else in the world toward peace in the middle east.  And I am going to assume that everyone knows what he has done to help Africa with disease prevention, and what he has done with Habitat For Humanity, building houses for people all over the world.  (Although my mom volunteers at Habitat For Humanity, and I’m not sure she knows the exact involvement of Jimmy Carter.)  Does anyone remember what Reagan did after he left office?  George Bush the first?  Gerald Ford?  They kind of disappear, rest on their laurels, and barely lift a finger again.  Bill Clinton has been working his tail off since he left office, doing dozens of speaking engagements at half a million bucks a pop.  Jimmy Carter doesn’t charge for his speaking engagements, and offers to give lectures at universities and hundreds of places across the U.S.  And, after this book came out, sometimes he was actually turned down.

In Carter’s administration, he aimed for less dependance on foreign oil.  From the time he took office until the time he left, U.S. imports went from 9 million barrels a year to 5 million barrels.  The States is now back up to 13 million barrels a year.  He suggests in this movie that the Bush government’s policy - which is not to speak to anyone in the world who doesn’t agree completely with the Bush government, is insane.  How can you ever see both sides of an issue when you won’t listen to anyone but yourself?  And Carter has the credentials to talk.  He is the one who did what many thought couldn’t be done in the 70s - brokered actual peace between Israel and Egypt.  A peace that lasts to this day.  Those peace talks are shown in this film, and Carter’s wife reminisces about that time in some pretty amazing scenes.  And the movie closes with Carter, as president, being both right and incredibly forward-thinking about global warming.

The one complaint I have about the movie is the soundtrack.  I like it - the songs are good, and interesting, like Djamel Ben Yelles, Alejandro Escovedo, and Neil Young.  They certainly fit the tone of the film, but the editing of the soundtrack is intrusive.  Rap songs, like one by Brother Ali, play while Carter is on the phone, so it becomes difficult to listen to both at the same time.  But it’s a small quibble.  Man From Plains is a wonderful film about a wonderful man.

The Golden Compass (5/10):  Based on the His Dark Materials series of books for kids, this movie is kind of a mess, kind of boring, and seems disturbingly unoriginal.  But it makes wing-nut hardcore Catholics angry, so it can’t be all bad.

27 Dresses:  Katherine Heigl, who is very gorgeous and recently starred in Knocked Up, now plays…a bridesmaid who never gets to be a bride…and ruins all the guy-cred she had with Knocked Up by making us rightfully cringe at the mention of this movie.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (9/10):  Absolutely magnificent.  The true story of a man who dictated his memoirs simply by blinking his eyelid after suffering a stroke that left him paralyzed.  Far more exciting than it sounds.

Hero Wanted (2/10):  Ray Liotta, who will appear in ANY movie ever, teams up with Cuba Gooding Jr, who should not EVER appear in any more movies.  Revenge and bank robberies.  Possibly also crap.  OK, quite likely.

Cheers, Season Nine (8/10):  One of the all-time greatest TV shows with one of it’s best seasons.  The introduction of the owner of Melville’s Restaurant upstairs is a beautiful touch.

How She Move:  When her older sister dies from a drug overdose, a teen-ager must leave private school and go to a gang-dominated high school.  She then finds solace in…step dancing!  Wait, haven’t I seen, and hated, this exact movie many many times before?

 The Big Gay Sketch Show, Season 2 (4/10):  Just being gay is not in itself funny.  Liza Minelli jokes somehow seem kind of old in the world of gay humour by now, no?

This Thing of Ours:  Could be cool.  Many of the actors most associated with gangster movies in history appear together - James Caan, Frank Vincent, Vincent Pastore - to pull off the “biggest heist in mafia history”.  OK, it’ll be cheesy.  But cool actors.

Young Indiana Jones Volume 3:  The Years of Change (6/10):  Ten discs.  Each disc is two TV-episodes crammed together into a two-hour “movie”, which feels like…two one-hour episodes.  But the special features will be fantastic for kids, and teach an awful lot about history.  So if you ever wanted your kids to get into Edith Wharton…

The Wire:  The Complete Fourth Season:  This will have Doc captured by the TV for the next week.  Looks like I’ll have to wait until next week to golf with him.

CSI:  The Complete Seventh Season (5/10):  They’ve kinda quit trying to be cool, and gone for gimmicks.  Sean Patrick Flannery (of Young Indiana Jones) appears, as do Danny Bonaduce and the always luminous Kevin Federline.

Dead Man’s Bounty:  A mysterious stranger rides into a dusty border town with a dead body, trying to collect the reward on the man, but then loses that money, AND the body, in a poker game with the drunken local sherriff.  Polish movie done in English.

Also out:

Beyond the Golden Compass
Moondance Alexander

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a magnificent film. It’s the true story of Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric), a man who had the world at his fingertips. He was the editor of French Elle magazine, rich and reasonably famous and with a great son and a series of hot women at his beck and call. Then, all of a sudden at the age of 43, Bauby was stricken by a sudden stroke that left him completely paralyzed. He couldn’t speak, he couldn’t chew food, he couldn’t move a muscle in his body except for his left eyelid. All he could do was blink his left eye. His mind, however, still functioned as well as ever, and he was able to do something extremely remarkable. Through the assistance of several people, he was able to dictate his life story and memoirs through only the blinking of his eye.

In this movie, “diving bell” is a fairly non-literal translation of the French title, which is “La Scaphandre et La Papillon”, which means, more accurately, the diving-suit and the butterfly. The diving suit refers to the way Bauby feels, trapped inside his own body, like a deep-sea diver stuck hundreds of feet under the ocean. The butterfly is his escape from this hell, like a butterfly’s escape from a cocoon, through this work he is dictating. The movie is in French, and ought to be watched in French (with English subtitles if necessary). The letters he uses to dictate his work are far more effective when you hear them in the French language. And although this sounds incredibly boring (so much so that my girlfriend refused to watch this with me), a guy blinking for an hour and forty minutes, it isn’t. And although his dictation takes up the bulk of the narrative, the flashbacks to the scenes in his life that play out through his words are wonderful.

There is also (which is fitting for this character) an abundance of really hot women around him in his hospital room. Olatz Lopez Garmendia as his physical therapist Marie, Emmanuelle Seigner as his ex-wife Celine, Anne Consigny as Claude, the woman taking his dictation, and the luminous Marie-Josee Croze as his speech therapist, Henriette. Of course, having gorgeous women around him all the time, waiting on him hand and foot (and butt and armpit and pretty much his entire body) is the last irony to his life, since he can do nothing in response except blink. We hear his own narrative inside his head, and he develops a sense of humour about this situation and his frustration at being unable to use his body. He also develops a vivid imagination, imagining things he used to love, and on occasion imagining himself having affairs with all these women. So there are lots of naked boobs.

Of all the flashback scenes, there is one in particular that stuck with me. His new girlfriend (he has just left his wife and son for this woman) takes him on a trip to Lourdes, where she wants to be blessed by the holy water that apparently heals the sick and transforms people. Bauby, however, is a skeptic and an intellectual, and wants nothing to do with this holy water and religious mumbo-jumbo, and even less to do with the gaudy Jesus-and-Mary souvenir shop. When his girlfriend buys a horrible flashing neon Madonna, and places it by the bed, he decides that’s it, he’s got to leave her. The scene is a powerful one, because we wonder - is this what the movie is trying to say? That this happened to him because he rejected religion? But later we understand that this is just who he is, and he will always find religion to be amusing at best, and even in his decrepit state, he won’t succumb to that “finding religion” thing that people do under similar circumstances.

Max Von Sydow appears in the movie as his father, and gives a wonderful performance that really accentuates the dynamic between the father and his son, and casts a light on Bauby’s relationship with his own boy. There is a recurring theme in the film about the Count of Monte Cristo, in this case a book Bauby was planning to write based on that classic. In Bauby’s version, he was planning to make the lead character female, and create a sort of female-revenge novel. Of course, this never ends up happening, because of the stroke, but this idea he has gives us a window into his soul and into his brain. The Diving Bell and The Butterfly is absolutely magnificent, beginning to end. And it’s also one of the only movies I have ever seen where those obnoxious dream sequences actually work and make sense.

When The Golden Compass was released into theatres, it created a gigantic controversy due to it’s purported anti-Catholic overtones. All kinds of right-wing Catholic wing-nut groups protested the movie, demanded that their congregations not attend, and complained bitterly about it in the media. Which, of course, increased the box office immensely. And the fact that it was still a dud at the box office indicates that had all these ridiculous groups just shut up, it would have disappeared from the public eye, made virtually NO money, and we wouldn’t even remember it today. Today being the day it is released on DVD, courtesy of Alliance Films. And I couldn’t really watch it without thinking about this anti-Catholic controversy. That was all I could think about. What are they so angry about? Where is the problem coming from?

Have you ever noticed that what you think of yourself makes you especially sensitive? Like, if you think you might be a dirty slut, you get extra angry when someone calls you a dirty slut? Or if you’re fat and you hate being overweight, then you flip out when people call you fatso? (This doesn’t happen to me - I don’t mind being overweight at all.) My personal hot-button is when people call me pretentious. Because, on some level, I am afraid that I might actually be pretentious. So, there must be something in this movie that the Catholic elite see in themselves that makes them crazy. I mean…crazier. So…what is it?

OK. This movie is about a parallel universe to our own. This parallel universe is run and overseen by a mysterious, evil religious-type institution called The Magesterium. Alright, they’re a religious-type organization…so maybe the Catholic church sees a bit of themselves in that. Perhaps they see themselves in the repressive, thought-police style administration run by this group. And maybe they think the hats and chains are reminiscent of their own. Or perhaps they saw the nazi-style uniforms of the soldiers who spoke German and said “oh my God! That’s us!” Actually, I made that up. Hardcore Catholics never say “oh my God”. But if this is what made them sit up and take notice, they must be a really self-loathing bunch, dem Catholics.

And the thing is, this isn’t a very good movie. It’s OK, it does the job, kids will probably like it alright. But it isn’t as good as it should be. As I watched it, I couldn’t help but think of a movie that was even worse - Sky Captain And The World of Tomorrow. Remember? Angelina Jolie, Gwenyth Paltrow, Jude Law, in a movie full of ancient bi-planes…in the future? The Golden Compass may well have been done by the same set designer, because it has the same ancient-future vibe to it. There are soldiers who are clearly Nazi-inspired. There are futuristic, long-distance high-tech zeppelins and dirigibles and hot-air balloons. There are flying machines that are like ancient Chinese junks with wings and balloons. It’s a bizarre past-future world in the present. And it definitely looks amazing, but it’s fairly irritating.

There seem to be no original ideas here at all. The characters have names like Azrael (Daniel Craig), which had me waiting for a while for the appearance of Gargamel, who never materialized. Another (evil character played by Nicole Kidman) is named Mrs. Coulter. Hmm…maybe that’s what has the zealots up in arms. A vixen who embodies all that is evil in the world called…Coulter? Perhaps a reference to Ann? Well, in the movie her first name is Marisa. We see it written down. Everyone in this alternate universe has “daemons” walking around with them. There is a group of rebels called the “Gyptians”. So…Egyptians without the E. These “daemons” are like our souls here on Earth, only they are manifested in animal form and walk around beside people. Which is pretty cute some of the time. But why “daemons”? Why couldn’t the author of this series of books have come up with a new name for them? I’ve heard of daemons before. These aren’t them. Anyway.

This is the second movie this year that teams Nicole Kidman with Daniel Craig. And, like in The Invasion, Daniel Craig has very little to do. He shows up at the beginning as the uncle of the little girl (Dakota Blue Richards) who is the star. The Magesterium tries to poison him, because he has discovered something that they want to keep hidden from the rest of the world. But Richards saves him, and then he goes off on a journey. And we don’t hear from him again. Then there is a really strange revelation toward the end of the movie, and I still have no idea whether it was for real or a ploy on the part of the evil people. But you see, this is actually the first film in what I imagine will be a forty-one part series, and as such there are many loose ends when it’s over. Also, this is the second movie this year to team Daniel Craig with Eva Green (you might remember Casino Royale). And neither of them gets enough screen time.

A few good scenes (like the polar bear fight) and a few great appearances by some cool actors (Sam Elliott, Christopher Lee), and an amazingly vivid set design make The Golden Compass pretty cool to look at. And I expect the series to get better. Dakota Blue Richards is very good as the young lead actress. More Sam Elliott, more Daniel Craig, and more Eva Green could really liven this thing up. But as it stands with this first movie, it ends up being much less than the sum of it’s parts, and it’s kind of boring. The best thing The Golden Compass has going for it is it’s message. The idea that kids need to learn to think for themselves, that independent thought is essential, and that not all authority is good authority. Hmmm…maybe that’s what got all those Catholics so riled up!

Cheers is one of the very few shows from the 80s that actually stands the test of time. And season nine is out on DVD today, courtesy of Paramount Home Entertainment. It’s in the midst of the Kirsty Alley years, back before she was a gigantic Jenny Craig spokesperson. As a child watching this show, I could not understand for the life of me why Sam Malone always wanted to sleep with Rebecca Howe. It confused me. I thought, this guy sleeps with every hot woman who walks into the bar! Why does he want the one who is fairly attractive at best? Not only that but she’s high-maintenance, she’s irritating, she’s kind of dumb, and she is a little mean. My mom explained that it was because he wanted the one woman he couldn’t have. At the time, I didn’t understand. I thought, the less effort the better, no? I understand better now, having succumbed to the same sort of mind set once or twice, but I still think it would be a lot better to just find a really hot girl with a great mind, like that one he meets every year on Valentine’s Day at that cabin in the woods, and go with it. Kirstey Alley seems like a lot of effort for very little return. But, that’s just me.

Season nine features some of the classic episodes of the series, like the one where Norm’s wife takes a job at the restaurant upstairs. In fact, the best part about season nine is the introduction of Keene Curtis, who plays John Allen Hill, the owner of Melville’s restaurant. His introduction leads to several great episodes where the ownership of the bathrooms in the back of Cheers come into question, and the feud between him and Sam reaches epic proportions. While Woody Harrelson and Kelsey Grammar are possibly the most successful actors to emerge from Cheers, it’s John Ratzenberger and George Wendt who kept the show outstanding. The ninth season was one of the best, and if you’re going to pick up one season on DVD, this is a good place to start.

The Big Gay Sketch show is a series that just had it’s second season come out on DVD from Paramount Home Entertainment. It’s produced by Rosie O’Donnell and it is exactly as it sounds. Sketch comedy pieces with homosexual and lesbian themes. Season Two features guest appearances from Chastity Bono, Kate Clinton, Elaine Stritch and O’Donnell herself, and those are some of the best sketches. But they are about all this show has going for it. This show seems to be relying a little more on gimmicks than most sketch comedy shows. This really has been done already, and it was done a hundred times better than this by the Kids in the Hall. Just doing a skit where characters happen to be gay is not in itself funny. The idea is that you have a sketch that’s funny. And perhaps adding the gay or lesbian element to that same sketch can make it much funnier.

But The Big Gay Sketch Show doesn’t seem to get that concept. They take the gay stereotypes that are the main source of humour among gay comedians and gay movie comedies and gay TV shows. Like, Liza Minelli jokes. Which is the equivalent, at this point, of a straight female comedian making “men always have to hold the remote, and they leave the toilet seat up” jokes. Oh. A man dressed up as Liza Minelli. And she is a drunken superhero. I get it. The best recurring theme of this series is when they re-do old TV shows, re-imagined as gay or lesbian shows. The Facts of Life episode is priceless. But there isn’t enough good stuff, and the stuff that really is good is spread too thin. This one can be skipped.

CSI used to be an awesome show. Bad guys and DNA and blood spatter and all kinds of cool stuff. And it’s still all about that. But it isn’t that good any more. The Seventh Season of CSI shows they have run out of ideas. Two-part episodes where nothing really worthy of two parts takes place, gimmick episodes like the one where the murder victims sit up and talk to each other in the morgue, sensational episodes like the one where the Clockwork Orange kids terrorize Las Vegas. It just isn’t the same any more. But at least it isn’t boring, like CSI New York. And, best of all, it doesn’t involve David Caruso, like CSI Miami. It does, however, involve cool actors like Sean Patrick Flannery, washed-up former “stars” like Danny Bonaduce, washed-up current “stars”, like Kevin Federline, and the always-smokin’-hot Marg Helgenberger.

There are several reasons to watch CSI, the main reason being that if you watch enough of it, you will know how to get away with murders. Now, CSI Season Seven comes with a special feature that will help you learn how to do so without all that pesky episode-watching. Las Vegas: The Real Crime Solvers takes us behind the scene with real-life CSIs, who of course have a much smaller budget and far fewer resources than the TV show. Well, less than the CSIs on the TV show. Come to think of it, the TV show probably has a budget, like, two thousand times that of the actual CSI departments in police stations around the country. Think about how many crimes could be solved if those resources actually went to the police!

Well, the original, (and still best), CSI seems to have maybe run it’s course. So perhaps those resources can be appropriated for a greater cause. Like CSI: Reality, or some such thing. But for now, those resources are being used to distribute DVDs like this one, CSI Season 7, which is worth renting or buying for these three reasons: First, the episodes have deliciously clever names. Like “Fannysmackin’”, and “Loco Motives”. Secondly, Marg Helgenberger is still smokin’ hot. (Although for that, you can always rent the made-for-TV Tommyknockers or the Steven Seagal classic Fire Down Below.) And thirdly, you get to see Kevin Federline punched in the junk. CSI: Complete Seventh Season comes out today, courtesy of Alliance Films.

The Young Indiana Jones series is reasonably entertaining, and reasonably good. Poorly plotted, hastily thrown together, and fairly implausible, but they’ll do. Especially for young kids who already love the movie series. Sean Patrick Flannery plays the young Indy, and he is pretty good (although for really good Sean Patrick Flannery, I would recommend going the Boondock Saints route instead). Every episode, he is getting himself into some kind of trouble at some moment in history, which is yet another reason that kids should be watching it. They might actually learn something. And the box set of Young Indiana Jones, Volume Three: The Years of Change has some nice bonuses. Every one of the ten discs has some great special features, documentary-style historical featurettes on whatever subject was dealt with in that disc’s episode.

This whole series was originally a TV show, running one-hour episodes produced by George Lucas during a three-year run. 44 episodes were produced, but not all of them made it onto television. So for their release onto DVD, the 44 episodes have been partnered up (sometimes bizarrely) into 22 full length feature movies.

The first disc, Tales Of Innocence, concerns Young Indiana Jones meeting Young Ernest Hemingway, and fighting with him over a girl. Much as I respect the work of Indiana Jones, my money’s on Hemingway here. I mean, dude. He’s Ernest freakin’ Hemingway. The man’s man. Nobody’s gonna take a beautiful woman from Hemingway. Although according to the people who do Young Indiana Jones, Hemingway’s kind of a sissy, and spends a lot of time simpering and writing poetry. The documentary is a little more accurate. In this episode, he also joins the French Foreign Legion and meets Edith Wharton. There are features on them as well. Which is pretty much the way the rest of the series goes through ten more discs (which is like twenty more episodes). Indy meets someone famous, either clashes with that person or becomes friends, and then halfway through he goes off elsewhere and meets some other famous people, and then the episode ends.

This would be a terrific series for kids to get into, simply because they would learn a lot more about history than they would watching The Fairly Odd Parents or Bratz. And the special features ARE the best part of the show, because they are…well…more historically accurate.

Reign Over Me is the type of movie that could very easily end up as a giant pile of maudlin sentimentality, one of those feel-bad-then-feel-good movies that irritate me so much.  Like The Pursuit Of Happyness, or The Green Mile.  In this case, it’s a little more visceral, 9/11 being something that touched everyone, so on a certain level we get it.  But what makes this movie great is that it doesn’t dwell on the “9/11“ part of the story, but rather the aftermath.  Adam Sandler plays a guy who was successful and happy until his family were all killed during the terrorist attacks.  But the fact that they died on September 11th really has nothing to do with the film.  It just gives us a reference point.  They could have died in a car crash, or a house fire, and it would have been the same.  It’s about a man who is incapable of dealing with his grief, and Sandler is terrific.

Come to think of it, is it maybe time that Adam Sandler gives up on comedy altogether?  His last few comedies have been dreadful (I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry?  Come ON).  In fact, outside Happy Gilmore, I can’t remember genuinely laughing through any of his comedies.  And yet, when he gets a chance to be an actual actor, like in Punch Drunk Love, he is very good!  And maybe he is capable only of playing damaged human beings, as he did in that movie and this one, but it’s surely a lot better than anything else he does.  Look at Robin Williams.  He made - what…ONE good comedy?  And yet he too is known as a “comic actor”.  Aside from Mrs. Doubtfire, I can’t think of a single good Robin Williams comedy.  And yet I can think of several good Robin Williams movies.  If he didn’t do that maniac crazy stand-up and those maniac crazy interviews, he could perhaps be known for Good Will Hunting, and Dead Poets Society, and One Hour Photo.  But no, he will always be identified with Popeye and RV and Fathers Day and Death To Smoochy.  Which is, frankly, a painful legacy.  Sandler is still young enough to reverse the trend and do some quality work, the way Jim Carrey is (trying to) do.

There are a few other things that make Reign Over Me great.  Of course, Don Cheadle, who is always terrific.  He plays Sandler’s old college roommate, who runs into him on the street and attempts to rekindle their friendship.  Cheadle is damaged in his own way, and Sandler’s character becomes a few things for him.  A source of comfort, I think, in the sense that “at least my life isn’t this”, a source of envy - “this guy can do whatever he wants, and no one will complain”, and a charity case.  Cheadle wants to help him, and it’s a genuine desire, but it’s still a charity case.  Also the music.  OK, I have a soft spot for The Who (Reign O’er Me), and the classic rock references throughout the movie are terrific - the scene where Adam Sandler berates a faux-Bob Seger fan is priceless.  And the references to Quadrophenia are peppered throughout the film, with the song Regin O’er Me figuring prominently several times.  Once you’ve watched this movie, you will never hear that song the same way again.