THE BEST OF ALL-STAR FAMILY FEUD (various years). How’s this for an irresistible blast of nostalgia? Mill Creek Entertainment has recently released five DVD compilations showcasing some of the most popular game shows to ever air on the boob tube. Match Game and The Price Is Right are among the featured shows in the other collections, but for my money, the best bargain is this gathering of approximately two dozen of the prime-time Family Feud specials that pitted TV-series casts against each other. These clashes cover the gamut of the Nielsen ratings: The Love Boat vs. WKRP in Cincinnati, Three’s Company vs. Soap, The Jeffersons vs. The Dukes of Hazzard, The Brady Bunch vs. Petticoat Junction, and other smile-inducing match-ups. The primary reason to enjoy this, of course, is to watch legendary FF host Richard Dawson in action. The former Hogan’s Heroes co-star found his true calling as the congenial game show host who seemed to equally divide his time between refereeing the games, cracking jokes, and kissing every single female who appeared on the stage, from gangly young girls to grinning grannies.
There are no extras in the set.
Collection: ***
Extras: *
GEORGES MÉLIÈS: ENCORE – NEW DISCOVERIES (1896-1911). Back in 2008, Flicker Alley released Georges Méliès: First Wizard of Cinema, a five-disc set which contained an astounding 173 of the shorts the innovative film pioneer created from 1896 through 1913. Since then, the DVD outfit has stumbled across 26 more Méliès miracles, and it has seen fit to release a slender volume that can either serve as a supplement to the box set or function as a stand-alone collection. The Haunted Castle (1896) is classic Méliès, a phantasmagorical yarn featuring all manner of ghosts, goblins, witches and more. Some of the other collection highlights are presented in color, including the gems An Hallucinated Alchemist (1897), The Inventor Crazybrains and His Wonderful Airship (1907) and The Spider and the Butterfly (1909). But while Méliès is best known for his fantasy flicks, this set shows that he was skilled at tackling all types of genres, including literary adaptations (a snippet from 1902’s Robinson Crusoe) and slapstick comedy (1907’s How Bridget’s Lover Escaped).
There are no extras on the DVD, although the set contains two films made by Segundo de Chomon but for the longest time wrongly credited to Méliès (one of the shorts, 1908’s Excursion to the Moon, is clearly patterned after Méliès’ most famous work, 1902’s A Trip to the Moon).
Collection: ****
Extras: *
HOWARDS END (1992). The best of the countless Merchant Ivory productions – and arguably the most appreciated by those who don’t even like Merchant Ivory movies – this rich adaptation of E.M. Forster’s Edwardian-era novel remains one of cinema’s defining statements on the rigid class structures that too often create irreparable riffs between a nation’s citizenry. The story centers on sisters Margaret and Helen Schlegel (Emma Thompson and Helena Bonham Carter) and their relationships with those who inhabit the classes directly above and below them. On the upper end of the scale, there’s the Wilcox family, whose patriarch (Anthony Hopkins) ends up marrying Margaret after his ailing wife (Vanessa Redgrave) passes away; on the bottom rung, there’s Leonard Bast (Samuel West), a struggling (and married) clerk whose cause is championed by Helen. The fiercely independent sisters offer a fascinating contrast in pre-modern feminism – Margaret’s bend-but-don’t-break diplomacy is a far cry from Helen’s firebrand radicalism – and scripter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala takes care to preserve the staggering ironies that permeate the tale. Thompson earned a richly deserved Best Actress Oscar for her eye-opening performance (Jhabvala and set designers Luciana Arrighi and Ian Whittaker also emerged victorious), but no less memorable are the turns by Hopkins (who somehow finds a shred of humanity in a despicable character) and Bonham Carter.
Extras in the two-disc DVD set include a 43-minute making-of featurette; a 50-minute documentary from 1984 on Merchant Ivory Productions; and an appreciation of the late Merchant by Ivory.
Movie: ***1/2
Extras: ***
THE INFORMANT! (2009). No stranger to coloring outside the margins, Steven Soderbergh displays a quirky brand of lunacy with The Informant!, a like-it-or-leave-it endeavor blessed with a terrific central performance from Matt Damon. Damon leaves behind Jason Bourne’s muscularity and goes all pudgy as Mark Whitacre, a midlevel executive at the major conglomeration Archer Daniels Midland. Whitacre seems like a pleasant enough fellow, so when he approaches two FBI agents (Scott Bakula and Joel McHale) volunteering to uncover a price-fixing racket at the company, they believe he might be honest when he claims he’s turning whistleblower because it’s the right thing to do. Unfortunately, with Mark Whitacre, there’s far more than meets the eye. In adapting Kurt Eichenwald’s book The Informant (A True Story), scripter Scott Z. Burns and Soderbergh find the proper consistent tone to allow this to function as a loopy satire. Adding to the mirth is a bouncy score by veteran Marvin Hamlisch, which never provides us with the musical cues we might expect. In fact, given the current state of the nation, with its stories of greedy banks and fat-cat CEOs bleeding average Americans dry, tackling this saga of corporate malfeasance with all comic cylinders firing might have been the only palatable way to present such a downbeat tale. Otherwise, if we weren’t busy laughing, we’d be busy crying.
The only DVD extras are four deleted scenes and theatrical trailers.
Movie: ***
Extras: *1/2
This article appears in Feb 23 – Mar 1, 2010.
