DVD Review

CHICAGO – There simply wasn’t space on television for both “Fringe” and “Eleventh Hour”. As soon as I saw them, I knew one or both of the fall 2008 shows would have to go. With the strong lead performances by the great Rufus Sewell and beautiful Marley Shelton, I thought “Eleventh Hour” had the edge, especially after it did pretty well in its first season.

CHICAGO – Legendary TV shows deserve legendary DVD sets and the “Ultimate Edition” release for the beloved “Blackadder” truly lives up to the often over-used “ultimate” title. Giving fans everything “Adder”-related that they could possibly ask for, this is the perfect gift this holiday season for fans of British television.

CHICAGO – Though graphic novels may read like great movie storyboards, they often fail to translate into compelling cinema. From “Sin City” to “Watchmen,” filmmakers have tried replicating graphic art with a reverence more suffocating than exhilarating. Images that reverberated with power on the page become coldly calculated on the big screen. No matter how tightly structured a film may be, it must give viewers the illusion of spontaneity. And there’s nothing more tiresome than a horror film in which all the scares feel telegraphed.

CHICAGO – Many editions of the DVD Round-Up have featured a different genre and focus for each title within it. This week seems a little more thematically linked as we have a trio of foreign horror films and a few more independent films than usual. Of course, there has to a holiday comedy to spice things up.

CHICAGO – “Left Bank” centers on` a woman whose apartment appears to be above a black hole, or a pit or something dark and deep like that. The Belgian horror outing (which has gone straight to DVD in the United States after playing in Chicago at the EU Film Fest) isn’t nearly as dumb as that synopsis makes it out to be, but in the end, that’s actually more of criticism than a compliment.

CHICAGO – A lot of classic TV comedies are often pointed to as being “ahead of their time”. The quirky, weird, and memorable “It’s Garry Shandling Show” wasn’t really ahead of its time because there’s nothing quite like it on the air. The groundbreaking cult classic is now available in a gorgeous 16-disc set from Shout Factory and it’s just what Shandling fans deserve.

CHICAGO – Can anyone explain to me why there are lavish, bonus-laden, beautifully transferred versions of so-so musicals like “Gigi” and “South Pacific” on Blu-Ray but the beloved “My Fair Lady” languishes in standard definition? It’s completely illogical, a decision made even more frustrating by a grainy, flat picture and mediocre audio track. Eliza deserves an upgrade.

CHICAGO – While adult comedies continue to rake in the big bucks at the box office, adult dramas continue to plunge in popularity, particularly dramas centering on the war in Iraq. When a brilliant edge-of-your-seat thriller like Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker” or a galvanizing documentary like “Taxi to the Dark Side” can’t even manage to find an audience, a tiny horror picture like “The Objective” doesn’t stand a chance.

CHICAGO – Over the course of dozens of editions of HollywoodChicago.com’s DVD Round-Up column, we have brought our readers more than a few collections that possessed a remarkable variety of genres in one piece, but few match this week’s column, a quartet of titles that include supernatural drama, reality television, foreign animation, and classic fantasy.

CHICAGO – Since the totality of what I know about Italian politics could fit inside a fortune cookie, I’d normally be inclined to demand that films on the subject keep it simple by not utilizing too many characters and not bothering with a complicated plot that spans roughly fifteen years. But the slick “Il Divo” didn’t have me pleading with writer director Paolo Sorrentino to slow down so that I could catch up with its history.