Tag Archives: dvd releases

On DVD: Which DVD Features Alpacas, Vikings, and Talking Plastic Bags?

For most of us, short films are either YouTube daybreakers (if they’re funny) or something unseen that still manage to get Oscars every year anyway. In reality, though, short films are just another vast and teeming film subculture spawning and thriving all around us, out of sight, like a termite colony. Since they don’t have any substantial commercial role and it’s tough to make money from them, of course they’re cinema non grata to the mainstream, but you shouldn’t need to be told that contemporary filmmaking is sometimes at its ripest, craziest and most inventive in the short form, and to do any kind of keeping up with that secret and unending cataract, you need Wholphin .

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On DVD: Which DVD Features Alpacas, Vikings, and Talking Plastic Bags?

On DVD: Singular Mystery Team Dares to Break Comedy Ranks

Comedy, because it’s best as a shared phenomenon, like music, is considered successful when you thrum the wires that get almost everybody laughing. But that can lead to a homogenization, a chortle-sausage approach — and if you’re familiar Chevy Chase’s career, even at its prime, you’ve seen the assembly line. Much as I can still get a rise out of the Apatow Paradigm, it’s already waning, a joke told 10 times. What’s needed are movies with no precedent, that reek of slightly deranged ideas and dare to amuse only of some of us — the odder few and far between. Mystery Team certainly fits.

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On DVD: Singular Mystery Team Dares to Break Comedy Ranks

On DVD: A Quarter-Billion Cantinflas Fans Can’t Be Wrong

Who’s Cantinflas? You may not have heard of him, but hundreds of millions of Latinos and Latinas from Buenos Aires to Beverly Hills know him as the most famous Mexican movie star ever — a comic figure so infused in popular Spanish-speaking culture that his name is officially an adjective and verb recognized by the Royal Spanish Academy. Think about it: A quarter of a billion people use your name in everyday conversation during your lifetime (he died in 1993). That’s props. And now Sony is paying tribute of its own.

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On DVD: A Quarter-Billion Cantinflas Fans Can’t Be Wrong

On DVD: When a Movie Fails to Become a Movie, Is It Art?

Rob Marshall’s newest old-school Broadway musical reconstitution, Nine , got humdingered by critics when it briefly splashed into theaters last year. Audiences apparently felt the same way, because they ignored it, and so just when you’re thinking Daniel Day Lewis can’t pick his nose without getting Oscar-nominated, the year’s biggest musical came and went in a fog of shame.

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On DVD: When a Movie Fails to Become a Movie, Is It Art?