Bonnie and Terry Turner have a bad habit of creating shows that start off well, then grow stale as their premises become less clever with the passing years. Witness the never-ending decade of That '70s Show. Or check out 3rd Rock From The Sun: Season 1 (Anchor Bay), which covers the show before the joke of aliens landing in middle America grew old, or John Lithgow's performance went from pleasantly hammy to where's-that-fucking-remote-already intolerable…
As thrilling as it was when Akira director Katsuhiro Otomo finally got his brilliantly animated mad-scientist adventure Steamboy (Columbia Tristar) to the big screen after 10 years of production, theatrical audiences faced a dilemma: Which version to see? The dubbed version was 20 minutes shorter than the subtitled edition, but was more widely available and more accessible, thanks to strong vocal performances from Alfred Molina, Anna Paquin, and Patrick Stewart. The basic DVD solves the issue by including both versions, but the "gift set" edition goes further by adding in postcards, a comic, and a 166-page production booklet. Or hold out for the two-film edition that also includes Otomo's even more brilliantly animated (though less coherent) three-story film anthology Memories…
In the ultimate example of "direct cinema," where documentary filmmakers do everything they can to remove themselves from their subject, Sick director Kirby Dick handed out 10 palm-sized digital cameras to the students at L.A.'s ethnically diverse John Marshall High School. After getting back more than 700 hours of footage, Dick whittled it down into Chain Camera (Zeitgeist), a collection of mini-diaries that hilariously and poignantly reveal the next generation…
Mike Figgis hopped on the digital-revolution bandwagon with his four-quadrant, real-time Time Code, but if that was the novelty single, then his unfortunate follow-up Hotel (MGM) is the full album, coming soon to a cutout bin near you. The quadrants are back, but Figgis adds a dazzling array of gimmicks on top of them, including split-screens, multiple aspect ratios, distorted whip-pans, and "night vision" cameras that make his actors look like bats…
There are no plastic bags floating around transcendently, but with its caustic-yet-sentimental treatment of suburban ills, The Upside Of Anger (New Line) might as well be called Son Of American Beauty. Things run along pretty smoothly until someone explains the title and ruins the movie, but until then, it's a pleasure to see Joan Allen and especially Kevin Costner operating at the top of their game. When Costner isn't tied down by deadly serious roles or impossible accents, there's no more relaxed and agreeable presence in American movies.