After a couple of heavy weeks the flow of new home entertainment releases slows somewhat, but there is a new season of South Park, a classic Mystery Science Theater 3000 set, and the latest episodes from the SyFy series Eureka.

 

 

There are not many releases this week, but there are some great ones including South Park: The Complete 15th Season (Paramount, 308 min., $49.98, BD $57.99), which includes 14 episodes of the long-running Comedy Central staple. In Season 15 the boys take on revolutionary product development, start new business ventures, and join the U.S. Border Patrol.

 

The other major animated release is CatDog: Season 1, Part 2 (Shout Factory, 240 min., $19.93), which contains ten episodes of the series that debuted on Nickelodeon in 1998 about a conjoined twin hybrid of a cat and a dog.

 

The top American live-action TV releases are Eureka: Season 4.5 (Universal, $29.98), the latest collection from the SyFy series about a town in the Pacific Northwest settled entirely by scientists and geniuses, and Mystery Science Theater 3000 XXIII (Shout Factory, 360 min., $59.97) in which the MST3K gang makes merciless fun of a quartet of hapless movie features including King Dinosaur, The Castle of Fu Manchu, Code Name: Diamondhead, and Last of the Wild Horses.

 

There are only two UK releases this week but they are also exceptionally good. The I, Claudius: 35th Anniversary Edition (Acorn Media, 668 min., $59.99), is a brilliant dramatization of Robert Graves’ novels, I, Claudius and Claudius the King.  The 1976 series is simply one of the most successful BBC adaptations of all time with a superb cast that included Derek Jacobi, John Hurt, Sian Phillips, and Patrick Stewart.  The intrigue and machinations of the gruesome political process that was also known as “succession” in The Roman Empire has rarely been evoked with such skill—this is dramatic equivalent of Game of Thrones, but these events actually happened.

 

Far, far smaller in scale, but fascinating in its own right is Single-Handed: Set 2 (Acorn Media, 364 min., $49.99).  This series follows the adventures of Sergeant Jack Driscoll of the Irish National Police who has to cover a large expanse of western Ireland and who finds a fair amount of entrenched corruption in the sparsely-populated and savagely beautiful region.

 

 

This week’s bestseller will undoubtedly be Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked (Fox, “G,” $28.98, BD $39.99), a live-action/animated hybrid desert island shipwreck farce targeted at young viewers and any parents who might think a reference to Gilligan’s Island can pass muster as satire.  Chipwrecked could only manage a 13% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and earned 25% less than its predecessor, but was still solidly profitable with a worldwide gross of $336.8 million.

 

Sometimes Hollywood studios can be a little too obvious in their quest for a “serious” film that will have all the requisite scenes and themes to earn a slew of Oscar nominations. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Warner Bros., “PG-13,” $28.98, BD $29.98), which stars Tinseltown stalwarts Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock, is an example of what happens when such a cinematic calculation is off by just a few degrees.  Yes, the film did snare some Oscar nods, but the movie, which also stars the talented child actor Thomas Horn, only earned $47.8 million worldwide.  Like the Iraq War, the events of 9/11 have proven intractable to Hollywood’s filmmakers, and this attempt to produce a heightened sort of “movie of the week” narrative about a young boy attempting to connect with his father who perished in the disaster, falls short as well.

 

The art house release of the week is David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method (Sony, “R,” $30.99, BD $35.99), a serious film about the yeasty early days of psychiatry that stars Viggo Mortensen as Freud and Michael Fassbender as Jung.  Since psychiatry appears to play a role in the life of modern intellectuals akin to religion in earlier eras, this is a movie filled with the most profound conundrums of modern life. Cronenberg contrasts Freud’s more pragmatic approach with the intuitive and idealistic style of Jung, who breaks one of the cardinal rules of the newly-formed psychiatric priest class by having an affair with a patient, who played brilliantly by Keira Knightley.

 

 

It’s another light week for anime releases but it does include one of the more outrageously surreal and randomly humorous anime series of all time, Bobob-Bo Bo-Bobo Complete Series Part I (Smore Entertainment, “10+,” 950 min., $49.98), which contains the first 38 episodes of the 76-episode series produced by anime powerhouse Toei from 2003-2005.  This series, which did receive some exposure on Adult Swim, is not for everyone, but for those who enjoy the highly self-conscious Japanese strain of “manzai” humor, which is full of puns, double-talk, visual gags, non-sequitur humor, and the wholesale breaking down of the fourth wall won't find a better example of this  very Japanese form of surreal humor than this series.

 

Another series of interest is Dream Eater Merry (Sentai Filmworks, “13+,” 325 min., $59.98, BD $69.98), which includes the entire 13-episode anime series by J.C. Staff that is based on the seinen action/fantasy manga series by Yoshitaka Ushiki and aired in Japan in 2011.

 

Also due this week are the single-disc releases Growing Up With Hello Kitty 1: Kitty Eats Her Vegetables (Animeigo, “All Ages,” 45 min., $12.98), and Growing Up With Hello Kitty 2: Kitty Learns to Share (Animeigo, “All Ages,” 45 min., $12.98).

 

 

John Ford’s Fort Apache (Warner Bros., Not Rated, $19.98) was made in 1948 and is the first and best of the director’s “Cavalry Trilogy.”  This thinly-veiled retelling of Custer’s Last Stand features Henry Fonda as Custer-like martinet, whose by-the-book ways are contrasted with the pragmatic methods of his second-in-command, an experienced cavalry officer played by John Wayne.  While not as good as its Blu-ray version of Casablanca, this is a solid hi-def transfer that shows off the film’s superb black-and-white photography to great advantage and provides viewers with the best version yet of this American classic. 

 

Buster Keaton’s greatest work was all done in the silent era, but occasionally he did get an opportunity to some good things in sound films.  Lost Keaton: Sixteen Comedy Shorts--1934-1937 (Kino, “Unrated,” $39.95) includes all 16 shorts that Keaton made for Educational Pictures in the 1930s.  A few of these including “Grand Slam Opera,” which manages to create some laughs at the expense of Fred Astaire and Keaton’s own problems with demon rum, are quite good.  In general Keaton was laboring under some major handicaps in terms of production values, but there are amusing and memorable moments in each of the 16 shorts—and this Blu-ray transfer, which occasionally has some problems due to the quality of the source material, provides the best versions of these films that we are ever likely to see.  This is not a great introduction to Keaton’s work (get Kino’s excellent Buster Keaton Short Films Collection: 1920-23 if you want to see why he was the greatest comedian in the history of the cinema), but all true Keaton fans will want to add Lost Keaton to their collections.

--Tom Flinn

The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.