Let the Best of 2009 lists continue!  I hope you all enjoyed my list of the Top 10 TV Episodes of 2009.

Now let’s dive into my list of the Top 10 DVDs (or Blu-Rays) released in 2009!

First, I’d like to give Honorable Mentions to the complete series sets of three amazing TV shows that I had just about given up all hope of ever seeing on DVD: It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, Andy Richter Controls the Universe, and Andy Barker, P.I. So why aren’t these shows on my list?  Because I can’t put anything on this list that I haven’t actually watched, and I’ve been way, way too busy to get through any of these sets.  Of the three, the only one I own is Andy Richter Controls the Universe.  (That one came out first, and I’m not going to purchase the other two sets until I actually have time to watch them.)  But I take great delight in knowing that these three DVD sets exist here on planet Earth, and I know that I’ll get to them all in good time.

10. Watchmen: The Ultimate Cut (Blu-ray) — I’ve seen Watchmen quite a few times since it was released early in 2009, and while the film certainly has some weaknesses, I remain overwhelmed by the enormity of its successes.  It’s hard to believe that Zach Snyder brought this seminal graphic novel by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons, which long had been considered unadaptable, to life.  It thrills me to see such a faithful take on the material and that the filmmakers had the confidence to craft a super-hero film that was aimed squarely at adults.  The Ultimate Cut of the film is Zach Snyder’s longest version, stitching together his Director’s Cut with the animated Tales of the Black Freighter sequences.  It’s pretty astounding.  This Blu-Ray set would be much higher on this list were it not for the paltry special features.  Not only are the special features lame (this is a movie that cries out for a full-fledged making-of documentary), but this set just reproduces the special features that were already released on the Director’s Cut set.  (I guess I’ve been spoiled by the amazing extended editions of the Lord of the Rings films, which came not just with phenomenal extended versions of the films but with extraordinarily elaborate making-of documentaries that didn’t duplicate the special features on the theatrical version DVDs.)  (Read my review of the theatrical version of Watchmen here, and of the Director’s Cut here.)

9. Contact (Blu-Ray) — A beautiful film that manages to combine a serious, cerebral sci-fi tale with an effecting story of the personal journey of scientist Dr. Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster).  This is director Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?) working at the top of his game.  The special effects are elaborate but never come close to overwhelming the story.  It’s a terrific special edition, chock full of special features, and the film looks positively STUNNING on Blu-Ray.  (Read my full review here.)

8. Homicide: The Criterion Collection — Another film that I have been waiting a long, long time to be released on DVD.  David Mamet’s 1991 film follows detective Bobby Gold (Joe Mantegna) and his investigation of the murder of an elderly Jewish shop owner.  What follows is a great, twisty Mamet tale, filled with tough guys and double-crosses.  But what gives the film its weight is the way the investigation story-line is wrapped in a deeper story of Bobby’s struggles with his Jewish identity.  The fine folks at Criterion hit another one out of the park with this beautiful new edition.  (My full review of Homicide is coming soon, but click here for my thoughts on a variety of other films by David Mamet.)

7. Eddie Izzard: Live From Wembley — It’s been a long, long wait since Eddie Izzard’s last stand-up DVD.  (That would be Circle, released back in 2002).  Live From Wembley isn’t exactly the freshest material — the footage is from Eddie’s Sexie tour, from several years back.  And the camera-work is surprisingly amateurish in places (quite a few shots are rather blurry, and there are several instances where Eddie isn’t properly framed on-screen).  But forget all that — it’s new Eddie Izzard stand-up material, and the performance (while not reaching the heights of Dress to Kill), is superb and very, very funny.  There’s also a terrific special feature on the disc: 40 minutes of Eddie’s stand-up from long before Live From Wembley, in which we can see him beginning to work out some of the material that would eventually be included in his Sexie show.  It’s a funny performance, and a neat look into his process.

6. Futurama: Into the Wild Green Yonder – The fourth and final installment in the series of Futurama direct-to-DVD films.  In this one, Fry gets inducted into a secret organization of telepaths (that have been popping up in the background of the show since its very beginning).  The film’s wide-reaching story also deals with Leela’s involvement with a group of eco-terrorists, Bender’s affair with the wife of a robot mobster, and a lot of other zaniness.  At the time, it looked like this was the end of Futurama, and the film’s final scene provided a wonderful capstone to the series’ run.  Luckily, the show has once again risen from the grave, and new episodes are being produced to air on Cartoon Network.  Hooray!  (Read my full review here.)

5. Star Trek: The Motion Picture Collection (Blu-Ray) — Star Trek comes to Blu-Ray with this fabulous set containing nicely spruced-up editions of the first six Star Trek films.  The films themselves have never looked or sounded better, and there have been a number of new featurettes created for each film.  (The set also includes almost all of the special features from the previous DVD releases.)  I still wish that the featurettes had been edited together into a longer, more comprehensive documentary for each film, but I can live without that.  Extra props to the makers of this set for choosing to use the original theatrical versions of Star Trek II and Star Trek VI on these discs.  (The previous Special Edition DVDs of those two films used slightly re-edited versions, which I found to be rather inferior to the original versions.)  For a die-hard Trek fan like myself, this set is a treasure.  (Click here for my full review of the Blu-Ray release of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.)

4. Will Ferrell: You’re Welcome, America — A recording of Will Ferrell’s stage show featuring him as Geroge W. Bush, looking back on his eight years as President.  I was a bit dubious, at first, as to whether Ferrell’s Bush impersonation could really sustain my interest for 90 minutes, but it unquestionably did.  The show is well-crafted — while the focus is on Ferrell’s monologues on Bush, there is also good fun to be had with short appearances by other characters, which keeps things interesting.  But all that would be moot if Ferrell’s Bush wasn’t so relentlessly entertaining.  My favorite moments of the show are when he dives fully into total insanity, such as his elaborate and manic story about being trapped in a mine shaft with his father.  We’re lucky that this live show has been captured for us all to enjoy.

3. Battlestar Galactica: The Plan — Ron Moore’s reinvention of Battlestar Galactica takes its final bow in this tour-de-force direct-to-DVD film.  Diving deep into the show’s mythology, The Plan winds the clock back to just before the events of the original Battlestar Galactica mini-series, and then shows us the events of the show’s first two seasons from the point of view of the Cylons.  Cleverly weaving in-and-around the events that we saw, The Plan connects events and characters into a complex and fascinating tapestry, bringing a whole new light to the show’s beginnings.  A terrific lead performance by Dean Stockwell (Quantum Leap) and mind-blowing special effects combine to give the show a far superior farewell than the actual finale episode.  I wish there were more of these direct-to-DVD BSG films being made!!  (Read my full review here.)

2. Monty Python: Almost the Truth (The Lawyer’s Cut) — This six-hour documentary traces the full history of Monty Python, from the group’s beginnings to their work on feature films The Holy Grail, The Life of Brian, and The Meaning of Life.  Told almost entirely through interviews with all five surviving Pythons as well as an enormous number of their key collaborators, this documentary is endlessly interesting and also quite a riot. It’s also filled with elaborate little touches that elevate it beyond the usual sort of behind-the-scenes documentaries, such as the creation of new songs introducing each of the six episodes, sung by the same woman who sung the classic Life of Brian introductory tune.  With a third disc containing clips from their best sketches, extended interviews, and lots of other fun stuff, this set is a winner through-and-through.

1. Robot Chicken: Star Wars Episode II — I loved the first Robot Chicken Star Wars Special, but things are taken to a whole new level in this second go-round.  Focusing on The Empire Strikes Back (with lots of screen time for Vader, The Emperor, Boba Fett, and the other bounty hunters), this special has more laughs-per-second than anything else I saw all year.  Hard-core Star Wars fans like myself will be bowled over by the attention to detail in the recreation of key scenes and the references to obscure characters and moments in the saga, while there is also plenty of silliness for a more casual fan to enjoy.  (Who wouldn’t laugh at the image of an Imperial officer putting a styrofoam cup over the little Vader hologram on his console?)  Just having the special on DVD would have been enough for me, but not only is this set absolutely overflowing with special features (commentary tracks, behind-the-scenes featurettes, deleted scenes, and so much more), but it also contains a newly extended (almost twice-as-long) version of the original special filled with a ton of new sketches.  Phenomenal.  I can’t wait for Episode III.  (Read my full review here.)

Coming on Monday:  My list of the 10 Best Movies of 2009!  See you there!

So, wow!  After the recent Comic-Con the web has been flooded with all sorts of teases about upcoming movies, TV shows, and other geeky goodness.  Here’s some of the best stuff that I’ve found:

After so many years of speculation and false starts, the sequel to Tron is finally, actually happening!!  Check out the STUNNING trailer here.  It’s going to be in IMAX 3-D??  I’m THERE.

I cannot believe they’re actually making a Jonah Hex movie.  (And with Josh Brolin, no less!)  Check out the poster.

The ending of Lost revealed?  Um, not quite.  Check out this video from the Lost panel!  Quite a lot of additional footage from that panel can be found here.  For some reason, Michael Emmerson’s fake audition for the role of Hurley isn’t included, but you can find that here.  Funny stuff.

Here’s a pretty bad-ass trailer for Season 2 of The Clone Wars.  I actually found the first season to be fairly watchable, and this glimpse at the next season looks pretty promising.

You know what it takes to sell real estate?  The same thing it takes to re-make one of the most brilliant TV shows of all time.  Well, AMC’s version of The Prisoner, starring Ian McKellan and Jim Caviezel, is nearly upon us.  Check out this lengthy trailer.  I must say, that looks pretty damn intriguing!

Amongst all of this glorious fun is the extraordinarily troubling continuing story about the newly-resurrected Futurama’s uncertain future.  This report from the Futurama panel at the con is grim indeed.  Can’t everybody just make nice already?!!

That’s all for now — have a great weekend everybody!!

Good news, everybody!  Futurama lives!!

So Katee Sackhoff (Starbuck) is joining the cast of 24 next season?  Time for the Battlestar Galactica actors to learn what the members of the ensemble from The Wire have discovered: they’ll never again be in a TV show as good.

Did you see The Daily Show’s John Hodgman’s uproariously funny speech at the 2009 Radio and TV Correspondents’ Dinner?  Not to be missed.

A nice farewell to Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles can be found on Composer Bear McCreary’s excellent blog, as he lists his 15 favorite moments from the show.  (They are all excellent choices.)  This show had its flaws, to be sure, but I am really disappointed that we won’t be getting a third season.  (By the way, Bear was also the composer for the reinvented Battlestar Galactica throughout its run.)

Speaking of The Terminator, the fine folks over at filmschoolrejects.com have posted an interesting list of 20 Things We Didn’t Like and 10 Things We Did about Terminator: Salvation.

I don’t play videogames, but I must admit that this trailer for Lucasarts’ new Star Wars: The Old Republic trailer is ridiculously cool.  I wish we’d seen half that much bad-assery in the prequels…

Triumph the Insult Comic Dog has made his first appearance on The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien!  Watch him make fun of some hippies here.

Have a great weekend, everybody!  See you back here on Monday!

Two rather high-profile new direct-to-DVD animation projects have been released recently — but are they worth your time and hard-earned dollars?  Well read on, true believers!

Futurama: Into the Wild Green Yonder — And so, once again, we bid farewell to Futurama.  Matt Groening’s lunatic sci-fi series was brutally cancelled by Fox back in 2003 after only four seasons.  Luckily, after several long years of waiting, the series was resurrected for a series of four direct-to-DVD feature-length animated films, of which this is the last.  While these new movies haven’t quite reached the high-points of the series’ best episodes (I’m thinking about episodes such as The Farnsworth Parabox, Roswell That Ends Well, Love and Rocket, War is the H-Word, Amazon Women in the Mood, The Bird-bot of Ice-Catraz, The Problem with Popplers, or The Day the Earth Stood Stupid), they have been very, very good.  The strongest, in my opinion, was The Beast with a  Billion Backs, in which David Cross (Arrested Development, Mr. Show) plays the alien Yivo who attempts to mate with every creature in the universe, while the weakest was Bender’s Game (as I found the extended fantasy sequence in the middle of the film to be a bit dull).

Into the Wild Green Yonder contains all the crazy zaniness, wild side-stories, and obscure sci-fi references that I have come to expect from the series.  The plot is almost beside the point, but I will attempt a summation.  The story begins on Mars, where the construction of a new Mars Vegas is disrupted by a band of eco-feminists.  Pretty soon Fry has been declared the savior of the universe by a bunch of telepaths wearing aluminum foil hats, Bender arouses the wrath of the mobster Don-Bot for making out with his wife, Leela goes under-cover with the feminists, and it all builds to a massive space-ship battle in the middle of an intergalactic mini-golf course.

The DVD is very solid — the animation is GORGEOUS, as always.  The story, despite some digressions, works well as a movie.  There are very few lulls between big laughs.  As for the ending — well, the original Futurama series was cancelled without any time to produce a final episode, so with this being the final DVD (for now, at least — hope always springs eternal that these will have proven profitable enough for more to be on the way!), fans wondered if we’d get some sort of “finale” to the over-all story.  Well, I think they got things just right.  The last scene is just terrific, with some nice closure that doesn’t close the door on further adventures.  And the very last shot?  Perfection.

If this is the end of Futurama then I will consider us lucky at being given the incredible gift of these four direct-to-DVD movies.  BUT… come-on… there’s a lot more mileage left in this series, right?  Let’s see four more DVDs!!

Wonder Woman — The enormous success of Bruce Timm’s Batman: The Animated Series lead to several other Bruce Timm-lead DC animated series: Superman, Batman Beyond, and Justice League. Marked by gorgeous animation and adult storytelling, it was intriguing the way all four of those animated series seemed to share a larger universe, with characters and story-lines carried over from one series to the next.  When the door closed on this DC Animated Universe with the end of Justice League in May, 2006, it seemed like the end of a remarkable decade of entertainment.  But soon-after, DC and Warner Brothers delighted fans by announcing that Bruce Timm would be spearheading a new line of direct-to-DVD animated films based on DC comics.  These would not be set in the shared universe of Timm’s TV shows — rather, they would each be stand-alone adventures, many of which would be adapted directly from seminal comic books, and they would be aimed squarely at adults.  Wow!  I’m sure I wasn’t alone at being overwhelmed with excitement at the thought that Timm would get to cut loose with some high-quality PG-13 animated films.

Unfortunately, the track record of this series has been pretty mixed so far.  The first project was an adaptation of the multi-issue Death of Superman storyline that made such waves back in the 90’s.  I don’t have great affection for that sprawling tale, but I was impressed with the way that Timm and co. condensed it into a pretty solid hour-and-a-half film.  Adam Baldwin (Jayne from Firefly) did terrific work as the new voice of Superman, and there was some pretty spectacular action.  The next film was adapted from a much higher-quality piece of source material, Darwyn Cooke’s retelling of the Golden Age origins of DC’s superheroes, The New Frontier.  Sadly, while there was clearly a lot of love on display in the animated adaptation, I found it to be pretty flat, missing a lot of the fun and dramatic energy of Cooke’s original work.  The third project was an anthology of Batman stories called Gotham Knight, with each short story created by a variety of different animators of wildly differing styles.  An interesting exercise, but not that compelling to me.

Which brings us to Wonder Woman.  I am pleased to report that this is a solid little adventure.  As always with these DC animated projects, the voice-cast is stellar.  Keri Russell is fabulous as Wonder Woman — tough but also able to bring a lot of humor to the role.  Speaking of humor, Nathan Fillion (Captain Mal from Firefly — I guess the casting director liked that show, huh?) is as reliably great as he always is as Steve Trevor, the pilot who crash-lands on Wonder Woman’s home of Paradise Island.  Fillion’s energy lifts every scene that he’s in, and he effectively walks the fine line between being a bit of a cad, but a lovable one.  Alfred Molina gives good menace as the villain, Ares, and Rosario Dawson, Oliver Platt, and Virginia Madsen also turn in fine work in supporting roles.

The design of the characters — the look and feel of the world — is very well done.  The design of Wonder Woman herself is particularly good.  She is strong and feminine without looking silly, and they gave her a slightly exotic look to her face that gives her a distinct, unique look, as opposed to appearing like a generic super-bimbo.  The animation is solid but not spectacular.  The film builds to a particularly carnage-filled battle in Washington, DC., which is cool, but the animation doesn’t quite sell the scale of things.  I think about an animated film like Akira, released back in 1988, that so gorgeously captured the enormous devastation that would result from the clash of super-powered beings.  In comparison to that, Wonder Woman’s final battle looks pretty small.  (Although, to be fair, so too does almost EVERY American animated film released in the intervening years!  And this certainly isn’t a big-budget theatrical release.)  I suppose the problem is that live-action super-hero films have gotten so good at bringing the world of super-heroes to extraordinarily vivid life that it’s hard for these modestly-budgeted animated efforts to compete.  For many years, these animated adventures could show us the type of spectacle that a live-action movie could never possibly capture.  But having just watched a film like Watchmen, it is now clear that the sky’s the limit in terms of what those films can accomplish with their visual effects — and these sorts of animated projects really need to raise the bar in order to compete.

I also found myself distracted by some pretty large plot holes in the film.  Who the heck were Steve Trevor and his fellow pilots fighting in that first aerial dog-fight?  After the other pilots are killed and Steve is rescued by Wonder Woman, he goes off on an adventure with her following Ares for the rest of the film.  But, um, doesn’t he have to check in with his superiors in the military, to let them know that he’s alive?  During the final big battle in DC, the President orders a nuclear strike on Paradise Island.  Cut to a missle shooting out from right over the Washington Monument.  Um, hasn’t it been established that Paradise Island is somewhere over by Greece?  Don’t we have some missiles closer to that part of the world that we could launch?  Do we really have a nuclear silo right by the Washington monument?  These sorts of lapses are distracting.

I sound like I’m being very critical of Wonder Woman, and I don’t mean to be.  It really is a nice rousing adventure story.  I really appreciated the more adult areas that the PG-13 rating allows this film to explore.  The combat sequences are pretty violent, and Wonder Woman and Steve Trevor’s banter is allowed to be a bit more risque than one otherwise might have expected.

Ultimately my disappointment is that this type of story isn’t where I wanted DC’s direct-to-DVD series to go.  The original announcement had seemed to indicate that the series would focus more on adaptations of classic comic stories as opposed to this sort of one-off origin story that isn’t based on any specific source material.  This is the sort of thing that most of the live-action super-hero films do, creating a new story that is sort of a “melange” of various bits of story-lines and background from the many years of the character’s history.  It’s not what I was hoping for from these DVDs.  (To my dismay, the preview included on the Wonder Woman disc seems to indicate that the next DVD, a Green Lantern adventure, will be exactly this same type of not-based-on-anything-specific tale.)  Where is my epic animated adaptation of The Great Darkness Saga?  Or Batman: Year One?  Or Kingdom Come?  How cool would that be?

Maybe someday…

It’s been a busy month here, but that hasn’t stopped me from checking out a bunch of DVDs recently, new and old:

The Conversation — Released in 1974, this masterpiece was written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola between The Godfather and The Godfather Part II.  Gene Hackman stars as twitchy, secretive surveillance specialist Harry Caul, whose life is up-ended by a seemingly-innocuous conversation that he is hired to record.  Confidently directed by Coppola at the height of his abilities, the film is a perfect study of a slow burn as we watch Hackman’s character gradually fall to pieces.  This is Hackman’s film, without question, but it’s also fun to see the great John Cazale (Fredo in The Godfather) and an incredibly young Harrison Ford in supporting roles.  The film is also notable for the contributions of master editor Walter Murch (American Graffiti, Apocalypse Now) who created an incredible sound-scape that plays with sound and dialogue in some incredibly inventive ways.  The bravura opening sequence, in which Caul and his team records the titular conversation, is staggering — like Caul, we attempt to follow the couple and their conversation, but keep getting distracted by people talking, music playing, and a myriad of other background noises, with the conversation itself flittering in and out of our perception.  It’s really quite astonishing.  Everybody loves The Godfather these days, but I feel that The Conversation is a film that has fallen out of the popular consciousness.  Do yourself a favor and help remedy that by checking out this brilliant film!

Band of Brothers — Speaking of masterpieces, there is this 2001 HBO miniseries executive produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks.  Adapted from the book by Stephen Ambrose, the series follows the men of Easy Company (of the US Army 101st Airborne Division) from their training in 1942 through to the end of the second world war.  I have watched this series through four times now since it was released, and each time I watch it I am just as over-come by the power of the story of these extraordinary heroes.  The production quality of this mini-series is unbelievable — each episode is really its own mini-movie.  The vistas are stunningly beautiful, and the action is gut-wrenchingly intense.  There are few movies. let alone TV shows, that are able to stage combat sequences with as much ferocity.  Over the ten episodes we follow and grow to love an enormous ensemble of characters: Damian Lewis as Richard Winters, Ron Livingston as Lewis Nixon, Donnie Wahlberg as Carwood Lipton, Scott Grimes as Donald Malarkey, Michael Cudlitz as “Bull” Randleman, James Madio as Frank Perconte, Neal McDonough as “Buck” Compton, Frank John Hughes as “Wild Bill” Guarnere, Peter Youngblood Hills as “Shifty” Powers, Rick Gomez as George Luz, Robin Laing as “Babe” Heffron, Nicholas Aaron as “Popeye” Wynn, Ross McCall as Joseph Liebgott… I am barely scratching the surface.  (Just typing out those names gives me a bit of a chill, as I consider the real young men who were so potently depicted by these actors… and also brings a smile to my face as I consider these great characters who I grew to love so much over the course of the series.)  Band of Brothers is brutal at times, make no mistake.  It is unflinching in its depictions of the horrors of war.  But it is also unflinching in its depictions of the remarkable heroism of these men.  It is an important work of television, and one of the most compelling mini-series I have ever seen.  

High Fidelity — What a marvelous little movie.  John Cusack plays Rob, a listless, thirty-something owner of a small record store.  When he gets dumped by his girlfriend, he begins a winding self-examination of his life and all of his failed relationships.  The central conceit of the film, that it is basically structured as a series of Rob’s musical top-five lists, is inventive and clever.  This is one of my favorite Cusack man-boy roles.  He’s sort of the “straight-man” here, at least when compared to the two fellows who work with him in his store (played by Jack Black and Todd Louiso), but he’s still plenty messed-up and funny to watch himself.  Speaking of Jack Black, this is the film that introduced me (and, I think, a lot of people) to his work.  A quick glance at imdb reveals that he had a pretty lengthy filmography prior to appearing in this film, including quite a few things that I’d seen him in (one early episode of The X-Files, Mars Attacks!, and Enemy of the State), but nothing that really left an impact on me until seeing him in this.  Black is a manic live-wire here, absolutely hysterical, and he is beautifully contrasted by the quiet, introverted performance of Louiso.  Joan Cusack, Tim Robbins, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Lisa Bonet all shine in supporting roles.  (Especially Tim Robbins, who is marvelously bizarre — what the heck is he even doing in this movie??)  This is one of those films that I watch every few years, and it’s just as funny every time I see it.

There’s a lot of other fun stuff that I’ve seen recently, including the first season of Mad Men, DC’s new animated Wonder Woman film, and the final Futurama adventure, Into the Wild Green Yonder.  I look forward to telling you all about them next week!  See you then.

Every now and then a great, cancelled-before-its-time TV show earns a magical second chance. My favorite recent example of this is the staggeringly underrated Futurama. This wonderfully bizarre and hysterical show, created by Matt Groening, was cancelled back in 2005, but it was revived last year for four direct-to-DVD movies. The first, Bender’s Big Score, came out this past November. The second, The Beast With a Billion Backs, is nearly upon us. Check out the trailer:

http://www.aintitcool.com/node/36905

If you don’t know what the twist of the story is going to be from the DVD’s title, the last line of the trailer spells things out pretty clearly.

In other news, the creator of the Pringles can died last month, and was buried in…oh yes, a Pringles can. Could I make that up?

http://www.suntimes.com/news/nation/983051,pring060208.article

Finally, in sad news, Alexander Courage died last week. He was a tremendously talented film composer and arranger…but his most famous work was probably writing the theme to the original Star Trek series. There aren’t too many pieces of music more iconic. What a giant. More information on his life and work can be found here:

http://trekmovie.com/2008/05/28/star-trek-composer-alexander-courage-dead-at-88/#more-2013

That’s all for me for today!

I’m a bit of a TV nut.  So, like so many of you, I had to go through a bit of an adjustment this winter without any new installments of Lost, The Office, and all my other TV pals.

How did I survive?  DVDs, my friends.  God bless ‘em.

Here’s just a sampling of the Digital Video Devicey goodness that I enjoyed over the past few months:

I.  Futurama: Bender’s Big Score – There aren’t a lot of shows (only Firefly and Arrested Development come to mind) whose cancellation burned me more than that of Futurama.  My goodness I loved this show. I still remember the moment when I first understood that this Matt Groening creation was a thing of awesome beauty and genius.  It was season two’s episode “I Second That Emotion,” (that’s the one where the Professor installs an empathy chip in Bender), in which it was revealed that the colony of underground mutants (long story) worshipped an unexploded nuclear bomb but, as one of the mutants commented, “its really just a Christmas and Easter” thing.  Any show that makes Beneath the Planet of the Apes jokes (that’s where the whole mutants-worshipping-an-unexploded-nuclear-bomb thing comes from) without care as to the tiny amount of viewers who would actually get that joke is a show that guaranteed itself my viewership until the end of time.  Anyways, this DVD movie was the 1st of 4 DVDs rescuing the show from oblivion.  It’s the bees’ knees, baby.

II.  Battlestar Galactica: Razor – Another direct-to-DVD continuation of a brilliant TV show.  If you’re not watching Sci-Fi’s stunningly amazing reinvention of BSG, then I have only pity in my heart for you.  This installment was, no surprise, gripping and surprising…in particular, the multi-layered structure of flashbacks-within-flashbacks was super-cool.  And we got to see a young William “Husker” Adama battling “toasters” in the First Cylon War!

III.  Zodiac – I totally missed this David Fincher film, about the real-life Zodiac murders of the 60’s & 70’s, when it was in theatres…and I don’t know quite what prompted me to pick it up on DVD.  But I found this film to be completely gripping.  A terrific cast,  including Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Junior, and many many other familiar faces really kept things moving.  And the beautiful set design & costuming combined with some really beautiful but extraordinarily subtle visual effects work brought San Francisco through the years to gorgeous visual life.

IV.  Igby Goes Down – Check out this cast:  Kieran Culkin, Clare Danes, Jeff Goldblum, Amanda Peet, Ryan Phillipe, Bill Pullman, and Susan Sarandon.  Find it.  Watch it.  You won’t regret it.

More DVDS I watched and loved this winter coming tomorrow!