It appears that no studio wants to challenge the release of the third installment of The Twilight Saga, which will clearly dominate this week’s home video sales.  With even the “TV on DVD” and “Anime” categories in “Eclipse,” the most interesting non-Twilight offering reviewed here today is Grant Morrison: Talking With Gods, an in-depth look at one of the most enigmatic and intriguing figures in contemporary comics.

 

Theatrical Films

 

Even though it doesn’t come out until Saturday, The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (Summit, “PG-13,” $24.99, 2-Disc Special Edition $26.99, BD $32.99) will definitely be the bestselling release of the week even with just one day’s sales.  The teen vampire romance continues to have a huge energized fan base, and the DVD release should also help sales of the novels, graphic novels, and other associated merchandise.  The lame Twilight parody Vampires Suck (Fox, “PG-13,” $29.98, BD $39.98) is also out this week.  If ever a phenomenon was ripe for parody, it certainly is the overheated Twilight saga, but Vampires Suck directors Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer (Meet the Spartans) unfortunately aren’t up to the task—the usual gang of idiots at Mad Magazine did a much better job.

 

A couple of expensive-to-produce box office duds, Knight and Day and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice are set for release on Tuesday.  Knight and Day (Fox, “PG-13,” $29.98, 2-Disc BD $39.98) stars Tom Cruze and Cameron Diaz in an action-packed spy saga that cost $120 million to produce but brought in just $76 million at the domestic box office.  "Light weight" is perhaps the best description of this action/romance/comedy, but it does avoid the hyper violence of many contemporary action/espionage films, and if the viewer is willing to suspend disbelief and go along on the cinematic equivalent of a theme park ride, there are some thrills and fun to be found here.

 

More problematic is The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (Disney, “PG-13,” $29.99, BD $39.99, 3-Disc BD $44.99), a bloated fantasy that cost $150 million to produce and earned just $63 million in North America.  Every sort of modern special effect is used to animate a variation on a theme that was performed perfectly in Fantasia.  This is one piece of its heritage that Disney should have allowed to rest in peace rather than attempting to resurrect it in what turned out to be a live-action hodge-podge.  With Fantasia coming out on Blu-ray this week (see “Classics”), it’s hard to justify spending any hard earned cash on The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

 

Also out this week is Going the Distance (New Line, “R,” $28.98, BD $35.99), a raunchy romcom that stars real life couple Justin Long and Drew Barrymore.  It hasn’t been a very good year for romantic comedies, so it’s sort of damning with faint praise to say that the uneven Going the Distance is one of 2010’s best, but it does have its moments, both good and bad—and at least it has a subject that folks can relate to—the real difficulties involved in maintaining a long distance relationship.

 

Documentaries

 

Comic book readers will want to check out Grant Morrison: Talking With Gods (Halo 8, Not Rated, 80 min., $19.95), a wide-ranging biography of one of the most interesting figures in contemporary comics.  Patrick Meaney’s well-constructed bio mixes extensive contributions from such Morrison contemporaries as Warren Ellis, Geoff Johns, Frank Quitely, Jill Thompson, Mark Waid, Cameron Stuart, and Phil Jimenez with a frank and fearless interview with the creator of Arkham Asylum, The Invisibles, and All-Star Superman.  Meaney does an especially good job of delineating Morrison’s family background (his parents were peace activists) and putting the right amount of emphasis on the years Morrison spent touring with his band The Mixers.  There is a direct correlation between the dandified pose he struck with The Mixers and the meticulous creation of a distinctive visual image that has made him one of the most recognizable figures in comics.  In the well-edited interviews Morrison speaks frankly about his one-sided “feud” with Alan Moore, his long-standing attraction to superhero comics, his use of “chaos magic,” and the supposed “alien abduction” gestation of The Invisibles.  Whether fans love Morrison’s innovative, quirky non-linear narrative style or not, viewing Grant Morrison: Talking With Gods will bring a greater understanding of and appreciation for his highly original synthesis of numerous strands of contemporary pop culture.

 

TV on DVD

 

In a light week, the animated releases are the best bets in this category, but even they come with caveats.  The Looney Tunes Super Stars: Foghorn Leghorn & Friends (Warner Bros., $19.98) does include nine classic cartoons featuring the down home drawling rooster who bloviates with all the patronizing pretension of an old school Southern politician plus six other cartoons that range from the cult favorite Goofy Gophers to the politically incorrect Mexican Crows Jose & Manuel, who star in the often hilarious “Two Crows From Tacos.”   Still, why not fill the disc with Foghorn cartoons, especially since classics like “The High and the Flighty” and “Mother was a Rooster” aren’t included?   But potentially the biggest problem with these cartoons is that most of them could be cropped like many of the releases on previous Looney Tunes Super Stars discs.

 

The only problem with Looney Tunes Super Stars: Tweety & Sylvester (Warner Bros., $19.98) is that all 15 of these cartoons have been released on various Looney Tunes Golden Collections.  If however, you don’t have the Golden Collections, this is well worth the money.

 

The top contemporary release in the TV category is Parks and Recreation Season 2 (Universal, 538 min., $39.98), which collects the NBC series starring Saturday Night Live alumnus Amy Poehler.  But the rest of this week’s top titles are all of the vintage variety including the classic 1950s western Have Gun Will Travel: Season 5, Vol.1 (Paramount, 488 min., $39.98), the early 1950s syndicated adventure series Soldiers of Fortune: The Complete Series (Timeless Media, 960 min., $39.98), and Lucille Ball’s follow-up to I Love Lucy, The Lucy Show: The Official 3’rd Season (Paramount, 666 min., $39.98).  For the nostalgically inclined there is Sid and Marty Krofft’s Saturday Morning Hits (SMK, 154 min., $14.93), a one-disc collection that includes 7 episodes of H.R. Pufnstuf, The Land of the Lost and other SMK productions.

 

The sole U.K. release this week is A Touch of Frost: Season 15 (MPI, $29.98), the final 2 feature-length episodes of the long-running series featuring David Jason as Detective Inspector Edward “Jack” Frost, an irascible, experienced and flawed policeman who is a thorn in the side of his superiors, but incredibly effective in solving crimes.

 

Anime

 

It’s a very slim week indeed.  The top release is Birdy the Mighty: Decode Part 1 (Funimation, “14+,” 300 min. $59.98), which features a new English language dub track.  This set was originally supposed to be released on October 26th (see “DVD Round-Up: Week of October 26th”). Now Part 1 will be released Tuesday along with Birdy the Mighty: Decode Part 2 (Funimation, “14+,” 300 min., $59.98), so the entire series will now be available with an English dub track as well as in Japanese with English subtitles.

 

Equally interesting is Hell Girl Three Vessels: Collection 2 (Sentai Filmworks, “17+,” 325 min., $49.98), which collects the final 13-episodes of the third season of the Hell Girl anime series produced by Studio Deen.  Each episode of this dark and innovative series is a self-contained narrative in which a different person petitions Hell Girl for revenge against an enemy—a request that comes at the cost of the petitioner’s soul.

 

Classics

 

Disney’s Fantasia (“PG,” BD $45.99) has always been one of the studio’s most difficult films.  Episodic and experimental, it remains a not always comfortable fusion of the high art of classical music with the low art of the movies.  But with the release of the film on Blu-ray, which provides us with the closest approximation in both visual quality and sound (Fantasia was the first film ever presented in stereo) to the film’s original presentation, it is clear that this is a version that true cinephiles should buy.  Yes, a few seconds of footage of Centaurs in blackface have been modified to be less offensive, but that bit of racial insensitivity was never a key part of the movie.  With its absence of dialogue, Fantasia is the culmination of all those “Silly Symphonies” and earlier attempts to wed pictures and music.  It has more in common with the poetry of silent films than with the development of the animated feature, which has gone off in a different, wise-cracking dialogue-heavy direction.  Still, even with its glaring shifts of tone and lack of continuity in style and quality, Fantasia represents a high point in the history of cinema—the fact that no one else has chosen tried to attempt to top it reflects the enormous effort and consummate skill that went into making it.

 

Foreign Films

 

Argentine director Lisandro Alonso’s Liverpool (Kino, Not Rated, $29.95) begins with the most protracted, painful, and boring credit sequence in movie history.  Devoid of any semblance of style and nearly interminable, they set the stage for a film that stretches a slight elliptical story that might, in other hands, have provided the material for a short student film into a feature-length movie.  Alonso adopts a minimalist style that consists of long takes that often linger five or more seconds after the actors have left the frame.  The film begins on a container ship heading for the end of the world, Tierra del Fuego at the very tip of South America.  With dialogue as minimalist as the editing, Liverpool follows one of the sailors from the ship who travels to a remote logging camp to visit his mother.  Alonso employs non-professional actors and, in keeping with his minimalist style, makes sure they don’t emote.  The bleak settings and the dreary high latitudes winter landscapes with their low raking sunlight provide the perfect complement to Alonso’s bare bones filmmaking style.  Liverpool is not for everyone’s taste, but it does amount to more than the sum of its parts and particularly in the scenes at the desolate logging camp, there is a ferocious beauty to the mountainscapes that loom over and dwarf the film’s human protagonists, who are isolated and apart from their fleeting appearances in Alonso's film, hidden from view at this desolate end of the earth.