Wallace & Gromit: The Complete Collection Blu-Ray

This title is a bit inaccurate since the wonderful theatrical film “Curse of the Were Rabbit” isn’t included in the set (and why isn’t it?) but this is damn near every single frame of everything else out there with the beloved and multiple Oscar winning British characters. For those who don’t know, and shame on you, Wallace is a inventor whose contraptions often cause more problems than they solve. Gromit is his dog who pulls his bacon out of the fire every time and is clearly the actual brains of the two, albeit without ever actually saying anything out loud. The set encompasses their four 30 minute films: “A Grand Day Out”, “The Wrong Trousers”, “A Close Shave”, and the new “A Matter of Loaf and Death” every single one of which is as awesome as this sort of thing can get. Also added is a series of docs, the complete “Cracking Contraptions” minisodes, the game demo, a gallery, the first “Shaun the Sheep” seven minute episode...this is family stuff that you don’t have to accept mediocrity to enjoy. I hate having to dumb myself down for the majority of the 'family market' oriented stuff to decide whether the very young (IE: those with less ability to distinguish quality due to lack of experience/things to compare to) will be able to keep from playing with their own wee-wees long enough to enjoy it. I don't have to make that sort of compromise for "Wallace & Gromit" because there's enough here to keep any age group's attention pleasantly tethered. There’s a cleverness to these episodes that can be as appealing to fans of a good mystery as to those who are here for the comedy. Any good collection would look naked without the best stop-motion animation series of the past two decades in it.

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Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles Season Two

As any of you know who read my review of the first season of this show, pleading with folks to give it a shot, “The Sarah Connor Chonicles” was much better than it honestly had any right to be. I wish I could say this enthusiasm of mine lasted into the second season. The development which was moving along so quickly in the first season slows WAY the hell down in the second. Shirley Manson was intriguing as a T-1001 (like Robert Patrick) in the little bit we saw of her in season one, a little can go a long way and a lot can go on and on and on. I’m being too harsh, because it’s not like the show stopped being entertaining. It did start to tread water though which unfortunately was enough to send me on my way to checking out other shows like “Dollhouse” which upset half the fanboys out there by making the cut for Fox, while “The Sarah Connor Chonicles” did not. I am honestly sad that the show didn't last since I had every intention on catching up eventually and I’ve heard this has a fantastic season ender but unless the fans of the show get their act together quick, I guess we’ve seen the last of Summer Glau as about the hottest robot ever. I know what I would have done with my own Terminator. Can’t BELIEVE there’s no porn version of this yet.

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Paul Newman: The Tribute Collection

Before anybody starts screaming, “WHERE’S fillintheblank, MY FAVORITE PAUL NEWMAN MOVIE”, this is, like all sets like this, made by one particular company (MGM/FOX) and thus only includes the films from their roster (although why “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” isn’t here is beyond me). That being said, this is about as good a collection like this you could ask for as THE mom gift this Xmas, trust me. She gets hot flashes thinking about the almost improbably handsome Newman back in the day as surely as your geek girls get a bit damp for someone like Nathan Fillion now. But Paul certainly wasn’t just a pretty face or provider of hippy popcorn and salad dressings. He’s won enough awards in his career to melt down and make several life-size Oscars and every last one of them was well deserved. Quite a few of the films in question are in this great set that packs in: “The Long Hot Summer” (1958), “Rally ‘Round the Flag, Boys!"(1959), “From the Terrace” (1960), “Exodus” (1960), “The Hustler” (1960), “Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man” (1962), “What a Way to Go!” (1964), “Hombre” (1967), “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969), “The Towering Inferno” (1974), “Buffalo Bill and the Indians or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson” (1976), “Quintet” (1979), and “The Verdict” (1982). All the transfers are lovely and each with a decent amount of extras, some with tons, like the few here that are multi-disc versions. The only let down is that they didn’t put this out in Blu-Ray instead but I suppose I’d have been writing this sometime much further down the road if that had been the case. Maybe I still will. Let’s see a set with Blu-Ray versions of the beloved “Hud”, “The Sting” and “Cool Hand Luke” before too long, kay?

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The Girlfriend Experience

It’s time again for Steven Soderberg to regale us with another low-budget tale using experimental filmmaking. “The Girlfriend Experience” got some notoriety for casting well known porn star Sasha Grey in the lead role, for being made for the shoestring budget of 1.3 million, and for being released both theatrically and on video-on-demand simultaneously. I’m not sure how that played out financially but artistically, if you’ve seen others of Soderberg’s experimental fare (“Full Frontal”, “Bubble”) than you’ll have some idea of what to expect. The story follows Grey as Chelsea, a ‘sophisticated’ escort (Re: Hooker) and her boyfriend Chris (Chris Santos). In a non-linear and overlapping fashion, the film reveals the girlfriend experience that Chelsea’s clients are looking for, and the kind she wants to be for real. It would be immensely more involving if it gave me a reason to care an iota about Chelsea but she comes across as more a less null, a character who when she isn’t playing the role of high-end call girl is a selfish and personality-less void without much to define her except an obsessive interest in some astrology off-shoot new age thing. I get that we're supposed to glom that she's as insecure as anybody else in one particularly 'who-gives-a-crap-by-that-point' scene but Soderberg seems more interested in a physical close-up study of Sasha Grey than having anything in particular to say with his film or even about her character. I couldn’t help but suspect that in his own way, he was looking for a sort of girlfriend experience of his own by making this, a forced intimacy that isn't much more real than the one Chelsea's character is selling. "The Girlfriend Experience" flirts with meaning but doesn't seem to want to commit. Still, fans of Soderberg’s quieter works will likely count this among his better films and the rest of us will skip the sort-of documentary on the extras, go to the internet and download some of Sasha Grey’s other movies.

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