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DVD Digest for August 28, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 14:00:00 GMT

It’s a good week for fans of classic comedy of both the big-screen and televised varieties. Plus, the Christmas DVD season officially begins.

DVD of the Week: Tough call this week, with no real world-beaters in the bunch. But in terms of sheer quantity, nothing tops the release of the mammoth Abbott & Costello: The Complete Universal Pictures Collection. Over the length of 29 DVDs, Universal has compiled every single one of their Abbott & Costello features, as well as plenty of trailers and production notes. In addition, they’ve recorded commentary tracks on six of the movies, plus three new documentaries on one of comedy’s most legendary duos. Also included in the set is the companion book Abbott and Costello: The Universal Story. So if you’re an Abbott and Costello fan, today is your lucky day.

Other laughs can be had in this week’s new TV on DVD releases. For the seventies-era TV watcher, there’s Good Times: The Complete Series and Sanford and Son: The Complete Series (both Sony). For something a little more recent, check out the woefully underwatched-in-its-day NewsRadio: The Complete Series (Sony). Fans of animated sitcoms should enjoy The Flintstones: The Complete Series (Warner). And we shouldn’t forget about Mystery Science Theatre 3000 20th Anniversary Edition (Shout! Factory), which collects four of the gang’s most-requested episodes (First Spaceship on Venus, Laserblast, Werewolf and Future War), plus new interviews with the whole gang and a snazzy new Crow T. Robot figurine that’s sure to make you the envy of all your geeky friends (i.e. the only ones who really count).

Recent releases on coming to DVD this week include: Brendan Fraser treading all over Jules Verne in Journey to the Center of the Earth (Warner, also Blu-Ray); Abigail Breslin in her seventeenth movie of 2008, Kit Kittredge: An American Girl (Warner, also Blu-Ray); Catherine Zeta Jones and Guy Pearce (as Houdini) in Gillian Armstrong’s Death Defying Acts (Weinstein); and a movie everyone will want to add to his DVD collection, Zombie Strippers (Sony, also Blu-Ray).

Finally, this week’s classics selection includes two of Warner’s recent Christmas favorites, The Polar Express Presented in 3D (Warner, also Blu-Ray, includes four pairs of 3D glasses), and Elf (Warner, Blu-Ray only, includes plentiful images of Will Ferrell in tights). And while Roger Ebert has gone gaga over the new DVD/Blu-Ray remastering of Ron Fricke’s Baraka (MPI, also Blu-Ray), allow me to stump for another sentimental favorite of mine. I’m referring, of course, to Juan Piquer-Simon’s Pieces (Ryko Distribution), one of the trashiest, dumbest, and irresistibly entertaining bad movies ever made. If that doesn’t sound like your kind of thing, stay far away. But if you’ve got a taste for gloriously fragrant cinematic garbage, Pieces is required viewing, Halloween or any other time of year.

Saying Goodbye to Bernie Brillstein

Phil Nugent — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Last week marked the passing of one of the most important behind-the-scenes figures in American comedy of the last forty years, Bernie Brillstein. Brillstein, who was 77, had a rare combination of taste, people skills, and bulldozing smarts, all of which he applied to his job as an agent and manager. (He was also, not incidentally, one of the best interview subjects on the West Coast.) Eager to embody every cliche of the classic talent-agent success story, Brillstein worked his way up from the mail room at the William Morris Agency, after anti-Semitism kept him from entering advertising in the Mad Men era. ("I loved them," he later said of the WASP agency heads who advised him that he was wasting his time trying to break in, "for being honest.") While he was still at William Morris, Brillstein met his first meal ticket in the form of a gangling, painfully shy young puppeteer from the Washington, D. C. area: Jim Henson. The two were quick to recognize what each could do for the other, and after Brillstein set himself up in private practice in 1970, Henson and the Muppets were his first steady star clients. Another was Lorne Michaels, which explains not only how the Muppets came to be regular cast members during the first season of Saturday Night Live--an arrangement probably best remembered for having inspired Michael O'Donoghue's remark, "I don't write for felt."--but how Brillstein came to guide the careers of many of SNL's stars and to score producing credits on some of their biggest movie successes, including the Ghostbusters films. In 1990, he joined forces with producer Brad Grey. As packagers of talent, their TV credits would include The Larry Sanders Show, The Dana Carvey Show, NewsRadio, Mr. Show, Politically Incorrect, The Steve Harvey Show, Primetime Glick, and the Tea Leone vehicle The Naked Truth, which would go some way to balancing out the fact that Brillstein also had a hand in Alf. (Once you've made a few bucks off puppets, it's hard to go cold turkey.) He also wrote a book called Where Did I Go Right?

On Monday, clients and well-wishers got together for a memorial service honoring Brillstein, and from the sound of it, it was a suitable testimonial to a man who sounds a lot like Santa Claus if Santa would have cut your throat with a broken bottle if it were, you know, in the best interests of the talent. Describing the action, Michael Cieply reports that "Martin Short, master of ceremonies for the event at Royce Hall on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles, set the tone when he described a man who had no enemies and always spoke well of others. 'It would be so much easier tonight,' Mr. Short said, 'if we were memorializing someone like that.'” Getting into the spirit of things, Jon Lovitz "got in his own jab at a former manager when he prayed, 'Why, why, why couldn’t it have been Marc Gurvitz?' Mr. Short, on taking back the stage, noted that the well-tanned but still portly Mr. Lovitz did not look bad 'for someone who let himself go.'”

That Guy!: Stephen Root

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 19:30:00 GMT

Okay, that's enough of the artsy-fartsy European creeps. Let's get back to America! And they don't come much American-er than Big Steve Root, one of the most prolific character actors in the business today. For a guy whose first film role featured him unseen in a toilet (although, considering the movie was Crocodile Dundee II, maybe it's just as well), Stephen Root has a rather highbrow acting background: for years prior to the kick-off of a remarkably rich film and television career, he was a respected member of the National Shakespeare Company. His first major recognition as an actor came when he portrayed the flighty, meddling billionaire Jimmy James as part of the high-powered cast of NewsRadio, and even with dozens of film roles to his credit, he's probably best-known -- and best-paid -- for that role and his voice-over work on King of the Hill, where he plays, among other roles, the hapless Bill Dauterive. A number of directors have enjoyed his work enough to make him a regular member of their repertory companies, particularly Mike Judge, Kevin Smith, and the Coen Brothers; Root's ability to play extremely eccentric roles while never giving the same characterization twice makes him especially sought-after by directors who specialize in character roles, and Root admitted in a recent interview that being killed by the Coens (as he, or at least his character, is in No Country for Old Men) has been the high point of his career to date. Having just celebrated his 56th birthday, Root -- who, to be perfectly honest, looks like he's been playing a 56-year-old for the lion's share of his career -- no doubt has plenty of years ahead of him both on the big screen, playing his specialty of suit-wearing middlemen who have something extremely wrong with them, and in voice-over, where he's proven to have exceptional talent. And with most of his comedic work for television widely available on DVD, a case can be made for Stephen Root as the preeminent comic character actor of the 1990s.

Where to see Stephen Root at his best:

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER (1992)

There are two kinds of Buffy fans in the world: those who liked the movie and wondered why the subsequent TV show took itself so damn seriously, and those who hated the movie and look at it as an embarrassing shell from whence the brilliant television series emerged. Unfortunately for those of us in the former camp, Joss Whedon -- who created both -- is in the latter camp and all but disowns the movie. But one thing cannot be disputed: the series would have been much improved if Whedon had seen fit to include Stephen Root as the rambling, hilariously clueless Principal Gary Murray, who made the end credits of the film so enjoyable.

OFFICE SPACE (1999)

Outside of NewsRadio and King of the Hill, Office Space forms the third jewel in Stephen Root's crown of 1990s comedy dominance. No performance of his is more memorable, more purely distilled, more quintessentially Root -- in fact, Mike Judge built the entire movie around Root's performance from a series of animated shorts he did years earlier for MTV. While there's plenty to love about this subversive take on the deadening grind of white-collar work, nothing holds the movie together like a single red stapler, and no character is more central to the plot, from beginning to end, than the psychotically ineffectual Milton Waddams. An all-time great comic role.

O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU? (2000)

We hate to keep bringing up members of the Coen Brothers Touring Company in this space, but what can we tell you? The boys know a good character actor when they see one. Stephen Root, in his first film with the Coens, has a small but unforgettable role: edging away from comedy and into (literal) tragedy, playing a variant on Tiresius as the recording studio operator and radio station man who first discovers the hidden genius of the Soggy Bottom Boys. Although Root has some funny lines in his scenes, it's his nearly-wordless performance in responding in a transport of bliss to "Man of Constant Sorrow" that is so astounding here.