Think of the lighthearted eighties spy series Scarecrow & Mrs. King: The Complete First Season (Warner) as a Hitchcock lark of an American innocent caught up in the machinations of Cold War shenanigans, all relocated to the eighties-era suburbia of network TV. At least that’s what the pilot episode aspires to. Dashing American agent Lee Stetson (Bruce Boxleitner), aka Scarecrow, on the run from deadly foreign agents drops a package in the hands of Amanda King (Kate Jackson). Suddenly this divorced mother of two and busy soccer mom in the suburbs of Washington D.C. is thrust into the world of international espionage and Stetson’s mission gets hopelessly tangled with this civilian’s life.

Bruce Boxleitner and Kate Jackson

I can just hear the pitch: He’s a slick playboy, she’s the mom next door. He’s charming and worldly, she’s chatty and practical. She dotes on him and, despite himself, he becomes quite fond of her. Especially since his boss decides she’s just the stabilizing influence this risk-taking solo agent needs and drafts her help as a freelance operative whenever they need believable cover in “the real world.” Which, it turns out, is practically every week. Meanwhile she keeps her double life a secret from her mother (Beverly Garland, forever trying to get her remarried), her grade-school sons and her (unseen) dates. It’s hard to call the growing affection between them as romantic tension, but there is a slow build and couple of near-kisses (always interrupted by the timely arrival of a suspect or a world-shaking crisis) to string the viewers along to the next season of their very low-key flirtation.

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One of my favorite films of 2009, Where the Wild Things Are (Warner) is Spike Jonze’s adaptation of/feature-length tribute to the Maurice Sendak picture book, expanded and reimagined in the spirit of the feelings that drives that story. Jonze and his screenwriting partner, Dave Eggers, preserve the imagination and the primal emotions of Sendak while grounding his preadolescent hero in a palpably real suburban world and then transports him to a landscape of craggy coasts and primal forests and sand dunes that is fantastical and primitive: the island of the wild things populated by a tribe of hulking yet childlike monsters equal parts mythological creature and demented stuffed animal. Call it an art film for kids or a fantasy for the child within, but it is unique and beautiful and as honest a tale of being a child as you’ll find on screen, with all of the joy of imagination and anxiety of childhood grounded in the imagery and the landscapes of a tyke’s mind. My feature review of the film is here.

A reflective moment for wild things

The DVD features four behind-the-scenes featurettes by Lance Bangs. Originally shown as webisodes, these pieces each have their own integrity as snapshots of an element of the production or profiles of collaborators and are full of personality and person expression in addition to providing a peak behind the scenes. Exclusive to the Blu-ray edition are the original live-action adaptation of Sendak’s Higgelty Piggelty Pop! or There Must Be More to Life (a fantastic live action/animated storybook creation brought to life with marvelous costumes, wonderful puppets, stop-motion figures and the voice of Meryl Streep), the “HBO First Look: Where the Wild Things Are” making-of featurette and four more webisode shorts.

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My DVD of the week, Make Way For Tomorrow (Criterion), was reviewed a couple of days ago here. Of slightly newer vintage is The Informant! (Warner), a film that straddles multiple eras: released in 2009, set in the nineties, directed with seventies flavor and set to a swinging Marvin Hamlisch score that channels the groovy sixties. I reviewed this lightfingered film, based on a true story but directed with a jaunty snap and a deadpan style that makes the absurd cascade of complications all the more astounding and hilarious, on my blog last year here. “Matt Damon is a constant churn of gee-whiz earnestness, righteous indignation, nervous exasperation and self-aggrandizing swagger as Whitacre,” I wrote. “It’s a brilliant dance of charm and delusion delivered with an amiable enthusiasm and wavering resolve and accompanied by a running stream-of-consciousness narration of constant distraction… ”

Matt Damon is The Informant!

The DVD features four deleted scenes which run about six minutes and were cut simply to move the film along; the scene with Damon and his FBI handlers, however, is a nicely understated bit that adds to a twist to their complicated loyalties. Exclusive to the Blu-ray release is commentary by Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns. Soderbergh is one of the better commentary track jockeys around, having talked not just over his own films but been a guest on other film tracks. He brings that talent as a moderator to bring Burns front and center in a discussion that ranges over all aspects of the film, from its inspirations (Burns initially heard the story told on the public radio show “This American Life”) to Soderbergh’s conscious shift in style to working with composer Marvin Hamlisch. Also includes a bonus digital copy of the film for portable media players.

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Doctor Who: The Complete Specials (BBC) – There was a noticeable grumble among Doctor Who fans when Christopher Eccleston left the role after a single season and the Doctor was reborn in the fun-loving, hyper-animated persona of David Tennant. There’s no question that Tennant made the part his own in his four years with the character, just as producer Russell T. Davies brought a whole new energy and sensibility to the iconic series with his 21^st century reboot. And with both Tennant and Davies leaving the series, they decided to give the fans something very special by way of farewell and followed the fourth season with five hour-long “specials” (well, four actually, but one of them was broken into two separate parts and comes that way on disc). These shows take what was inherent in this incarnation of the Doctor and finally, fatefully transform the last of the Time Lords from happy-go-lucky time- and space-traveler into a tragic hero on a collision course with destiny and a death foretold.

David Tennant faces The End of Time

The adventuresome Planet of the Dead (with Michelle Ryan) and the melancholy The Next Doctor (with David Morrissey) have already appeared separately on DVD and Blu-ray. The rest debut this week, separately or in DVD and Blu-ray box sets. The Waters of Mars, starring Lindsay Duncan as the leader of an Earth colony on Mars, is an invasion thriller that puts the Doctor in the heartbreaking position of putting compassion up against the laws of time and space that he considers immutable. Under the spring-loaded energy and snappy repartee that gives The Doctor his goofy amiability and lighthearted lift, Tennant layers in a note of anguish that is fully brought forth in the two-part The End of Time (titles don’t come more epic than that). And they outdo themselves on The End of Time, which delves into the mystery of the Time Lords (check out Timothy Dalton as narrator and rogue Time Lord), spins an apocalyptic showdown like you’ve never seen (John Simm as the Time Master, a madman with seemingly unlimited power to transform himself into… well, something epic) and ends with a touching farewell tour of the lives the Doctor has touched in his current incarnation before his inevitable transformation. It’s a touching and deserved farewell to one of the finest incarnations of The Doctor. Each of the specials runs just under an hour except for The End of Time, Part Two, which runs over to give the Doctor time to say farewell to everyone.

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The release week between Christmas Day and New Year’s Day is traditionally an off week for DVD, usually with just a couple of minor releases. Not so this year. TV releases this week include Glee: Season 1: Road To Sectionals (Fox) and United States Of Tara: The First Season (Paramount) (see TV on DVD here), and there are some substantial film releases debuting this week.

David Twohy’s A Perfect Getaway (Universal) is a deft piece of genre filmmaking, which is no backhanded compliment. In a film culture where B-movie plots are routinely executed with budgets in excess of $100 million in place of intelligence and thrown into thousands of theaters, the well-tuned genre piece is an increasingly rare breed. A Perfect Getaway is a type of film we’re used to seeing in myriad variations: an urban couple leaves the comfort of civilization for a vacation isolated in the wilds, where there just so happens to be a killer on the loose and no end to suspicious characters.

A Perfect Getaway: Trouble in paradise

Twohy delivers everything we expect—attractive performers in paradise (Steve Zahn and Milla Jovovich as cute urbanites fumbling through the jungle, Timothy Olyphant and Kiele Sanchez as rather more prepared trail companions), breathtaking landscapes and lush scenery, ominous tensions and plenty of action—and something you likely did not: suspense, surprise and sheer fun. In a film culture where genre storytelling all too often boils down to the stock gimmicks used over and over again with special effects or high concept twists to hide the familiarity, this is so refreshingly old school smart that it feels almost new. For more on the film, read my feature review here. The DVD features both the theatrical cut and a “Director’s Cut,” which runs about ten minutes longer, but no other supplements. The Blu-ray features an alternate ending, which isn’t all that different but is significantly shorter. I prefer the original.

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Battlestar Galactica: The Complete Series (Universal) – Yes, I’m aware that this oddly designed box set is not new this season. It was actually released in the summer but I only received it while working on the MSN “Best of 2009″ DVD and Blu-ray list. And while it didn’t make the list, it’s one of the best TV shows of the decade and, for all the issues with the packaging, still the best way to get the entire show in one cost-effective swoop.

Battlestar Galactica

Forget the original clunky, kitschy 1980s sci-fi series. This series is more than a revival, it’s a creative, clever, and compelling rethinking of the show. The drama about the human survivors of an intergalactic massacre on a deep space wagon train search for the mythical plant Earth is reborn with a new generation of Cylons (a robot race originally created by humans who declare war on their creators) and a fascinating new command dynamic. In place of the paternal guidance of Lorne Greene is Edward James Olmos as Commander Adama, an old-school Battlestar commander in an archaic ship, and this time he’s sharing power and responsibility with a civilian President (Mary McDonnell), much to his crusty frustration. And there are other inspired reinventions: Baltar (James Callis), an absurdly evil and short sighted villain in the original, is a tormented scientist tricked into becoming a traitor and haunted by a phantom Cylon sexpot (Tricia Helfer), and the swaggering hotshot pilot Starbuck (Katee Sackhoff) is a cigar-chomping, rule-breaking girl who looks like she could kick Dirk Benedict’s ass around the galaxy and back.

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The aliens arrived almost thirty years ago, their crippled spacecraft hovering to a halt over Johannesburg, where it remains hovering over the city. That defining image hovers over the entirety of District 9 (Sony), a savagely whipsmart satire of first contact with an alien species reduced to repressed immigrant population from first-time feature director Neill Blomkamp and producer Peter Jackson. What should be an ominous and amazing transport from another world is neither threat nor utopian promise, merely an annoyance to the local human population that can’t look to the sky without seeing that reminder of an unwanted subculture that has been segregated and shunted to the slums: the aliens have become the underclass.

Evicting those pesky alien squatters

What could be an unbearably bleak and cynical portrait becomes a ferociously entertaining piece of science fiction thriller in the hands of Blomkamp, who frames the story through the bumbling obliviousness of amiable idiot civil servant Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley), a grinning administrative functionary promoted far beyond his pay scale and his abilities. All the better to run the Department of Alien Affairs as a front for outsourcing millions in private security and turning the concentration camp inmates (sorry, that’s segregated population) into research subjects for the weapons division. You can find my full film review on the blog here.

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The Tudors: The Complete Third Season (Paramount) – England’s young King Henry VIII works his way through wives three and four in the third season of Showtime’s rather lusty take on the historical drama. This isn’t the rotund, boorish glutton as defined by Charles Laughton. As incarnated by Jonathan Rhys Meyers he is a robust, virile, hearty young king with a lust for life, power and women. The British/American co-production was made for Showtime as part of their strategy to challenge HBO’s primacy in original programming, and the pay cable venue means that it can indulge in the lustier aspects of this slice of old England: the affairs, the dalliances, the seductions in fleshy detail.

Henry VII (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) and Jane Seymour (Anita Briem)

But while the sex is the lure, the show is all about power and politics: the jockeying for influence in the court, the behind-the-scenes scheming to keep Henry’s favor, the treaties and royal marriages engineered for European alliances, and the increasingly tense relationship between the monarchies and the Vatican, which wields a power almost of powerful as that of royalty… until now. Henry makes himself head of the Church of England and brings the country to the verge of civil war. Meanwhile he grieves over the death of this third wife, Jane Seymour (Anita Briem), due to complications from childbirth and gives up on Anne of Cleves (Joss Stone), an unsophisticated German aristocrat to whom he is betrothed sight unseen, without ever consummating the marriage (his displeasure at the his advisor’s poor judgment – Henry finds Anne homely and unappealing in every way – has fatal consequences for the unlucky matchmaker). And, of course, there are the various mistresses along the way. A king has needs. Max Von Sydow co-stars this season as a Vatican Cardinal scheming to return the Catholic Church to power in England. Eight episodes on four discs, plus a featurette on the historical timeline. The fourth and final season begins on Showtime in 2010.

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Arnaud Desplechin’s mercurial, knotty and cinematically vibrant drama of family dysfunction stirred up over a Christmas gathering was the top film of my Best of the Year list in 2008. Now A Christmas Tale (Criterion) arrives on DVD in a presentation worthy of it. Directing with an even more restless energy than he showed in Kings and Queen, Desplechin sketches out a family tragedy, the untimely death of a first-born, that precedes the story by decades and then only overtly references it a few times, even as the shadow of that death hovers over the film: in the cancer that family matron Junon (Catherine Deneuve) has been diagnosed with, in the fragility of her teenage grandson Paul (Emile Berling), and in the odd sibling dynamics that have caused eldest daughter Elizabeth (Anne Consigny) to, in effect, legally separate herself from her brother Ivan (Mathieu Amalric, in a mesmerizingly manic-depressive performance).

Mathieu Amalric and Catherine Deneuve

“Henri is the disease,” she tells us in one of the film’s direct address monologues, but perhaps the disease is in the blood – the same disease that killed Joseph at age six, the same disease that will eventually kill her mother (even with a bone marrow transplant, which will only give her a few more years; they have the mathematical formula to prove it!), and maybe the same disease that haunts her own son, Paul. For whatever reasons, Paul seeks out his outcast Uncle Henri and invites him to the family Christmas he’s been banished from for five years; this helps stir up quite a holiday nog, complete with a brutal little brawl and a bit of adultery that may come some way to smoothing over a few emotional rough patches.

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Downhill Racer (Criterion) is the feature debut of Michael Ritchie, the first project that frustrated actor and future movie star Robert Redford developed for himself and the first of Redford’s proposed trilogy about the meaning of “winning” in American culture. That’s what gives such a riveting perspective to what would otherwise be called a “sports movie”: Redford’s David Chappellet, the brash, self-involved hotshot on the American ski team, is less concerned with the beauty of the sport than the attention of victory and fame.

David Chappellet (Robert Redford) looks up to check his standing

Directed from a script by novelist James Salter and shot on location on the European ski circuit (where the director and star incorporated ideas and opportunities into the film as they arose), Downhill Racer makes no bones about Chappellet’s fierce ambition or dismissive arrogance, but the downhill runs are shot and edited with a visceral quality that takes us off the sidelines and into the skier’s perspective. The screen goes silent but for the cut of skis slicing a track through the snow and whoosh of the crisp mountain air whipping by and the camera captures the run in long takes and full shots to study the integrity of the athlete’s movement and at times watches the rush through the skier’s eyes, to give is the rush, the focus and the intensity of the experience. The rest of the film reminds us of the industry behind the sport—raising money for the national team, traveling from one contest to another, negotiating for top draws (the earlier the pick, the fresher the snow pack) and managing the media—and the culture of fame. Redford’s matinee looks are more than just Hollywood casting in this context; the film never says it in so many words, but it’s clear that Chappellet’s popularity is as much for his good looks as for his success. The crowds love a handsome champion. Gene Hackman is the practical coach who doesn’t like Chappellet or his attitude but knows that his ambition is the team’s best chance for a win and sixties screen beauty Camilla Sparv is Chappellet’s counterpart, a ski company rep who treats romance with the same emotional disconnection that Chappellet treats everything else.

Criterion’s disc advertises itself as 1.85 but is actually adjusted to the TV widescreen standard of 1.77:1. The disc features two interview featurettes, each running about half an hour. “Redford and Salter” features new video interviews with Redford, who lays out the history of the film and his career and his determination to get it made in the face of studio resistance, and writer James Salter, who discusses the evolution of the script and how it changed during the filmmaking. “Coblenz, Harris, and Jalbert” features film editor Richard Harris, production manager Walter Coblenz, and former downhill skier Joe Jay Jalbert, who served as technical adviser and ski double. There are audio-only excerpts from a 1977 American Film Institute seminar with director Michael Ritchie, the archival promotional short How Fast? and a booklet with an essay by critic Todd McCarthy.

I’ll be writing about another essential release this week, Milestone’s excellent two-disc edition of Kent McKenzie’s The Exiles, as well as two features from Seattle filmmaker Lynn Shelton, My Effortless Brilliance and Humpday, in another post. As I’m personally involved in the former (I participate in the commentary with author and filmmaker Sherman Alexie and interview Alexie for a bonus audio supplement) and am friends with Shelton, director of the latter, I can hardly be objective. But I can and will be supportive of both releases in a separate piece. (Update: it’s now up and posted here.)

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The first trademark hit for the Sci Fi channel (long before they rebranded themselves SyFy), Farscape spanned four seasons (1999-2003) plus a mini-series to wrap the story that should have been the fifth and final season (fans were close to revolt when the Sci-Fi Channel abruptly cancelled their cult space opera). ADV, a home video label that otherwise specialized in Japanese anime and a smattering of live action Japanese genre cinema, has released the show in any number incarnations, constantly repackaging the episodes in larger and larger sets but never pulling it all together. Farscape: The Complete Series (A&E) finally does just that. If you missed the trip through the wormhole, here’s the gist of it: Ben Browder is John Crichton, an American astronaut flung to the far side of the galaxy through a wormhole and into a living ship filled with fugitives from a Fascist authoritarian force ironically named Peacekeepers.

Farscape, circa Season Two

There’s the usual panoply of exotic aliens, marbled worlds, and spacescapes that look ripped from the cover of Amazing Stories, but Farscape was more than space opera and pulp adventure. There’s huge cultural gap between the crew of six motley fugitives who band together to survive, all with their own (often clashing) agendas, and they are desperate: in one episode in the first season, DNA Mad Scientist, they’re offered a way home in exchange for a sample of their DNA and one of Pilot’s arms. They hack the appendage off with mercenary efficiency and then turn on each other. The crew is filled out by former peacekeeper soldier Aeryn Sun (Claudia Black), the blue-skinned plant woman and priestess Zhaan (Virginia Hey), lion-maned, hot-tempered warrior Anthony Simcoe (D’Argo), overthrown emperor Rygel (a furry, self-involved Muppet), the giant mantis-like Pilot (another impressive Muppet, this one a huge creature whose scale we only discover in the above-mentioned episode DNA Mad Scientist) and, joining late in the first season, wild-child Chiana (Gigi Edgley). That’s right around the time that Scorpius, the ash white half-breed alien with an SS streak in him and the best villain on sci-fi TV of the past 20 years, starts his obsessive hunt for Crichton and the wormhole technology that is hidden somewhere in his brain, and their wanted status makes them a target any time they try to land. As you can guess, the totalitarian worlds and mercenary survivors they meet are a far cry from the Federation friendly universe of Star Trek and the dark art direction and wild, often grotesque creatures (courtesy of Jim Henson studios) made this the most imaginative and unpredictable science fiction show on TV in its pre-Battlestar Galactica day.

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In Nightwatching (E1), cinema provocateur Peter Greenaway  turns art history into a stylized murder mystery with this provocative look at the creation of one of the most revered paintings in the history of western art: Rembrandt’s “The Nightwatch.” This is not your usual genteel portrait of an artist or biography of a painting and has none of the romantic tone of Girl with a Pearl Earring or visionary obsession of The Agony and the Ecstasy. As played by Martin Freeman, Rembrandt is earthy, arrogant and outspoken, and in his grief over the death of his wife Saskia (Eva Birthistle), he becomes obsessed with turning his commission to paint the group portrait of Amsterdam Musketeer Militia into an indictment of its grasping, corrupt members through carefully placed clues and symbols. Directed in a highly theatrical style on vast stage-like sets, painted in the somber shades of Rembrandt’s nocturnal colors and sculpted in tightly controlled pools and carefully controlled shafts of illumination that can only be described as Rembrandt lighting, the entire film is designed to look like a Rembrandt canvas, right down to the careful composition of the players within the frame.

Peter Greenaway's "Rembrandt's J'Accuse"

The two-disc set comes with Greenaway’s fascinating companion film Rembrandt’s J’Accuse, which is neither a making-of nor a tradition documentary but an essay film that continues his study of the painting and the story behind it with detailed analysis of the canvas and historical commentary of the culture around it. It’s a fascinating piece of art history with a provocative perspective as rife with social politics and power politics as it is aesthetics.
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