DVD Review

CHICAGO – Few films have more notably put viewers in the middle of a health crisis than David France’s Oscar-nominated “How to Survive a Plague,” recently released on DVD. With a ton of archival footage of the battle to increase the speed and severity of the drug trials that would help battle AIDS, France’s film captures something important about the war against one of the deadliest diseases of the last century. How do you survive? You fight.

CHICAGO – John Cusack is in a very bad mood. Not even a home-cooked Thanksgiving dinner can melt his icily grim disposition, as he speeds through traffic, shouts expletives at random extras and takes part in several terse phone conversations (hopefully with his agent). Of course, if I was an A-grade actor trapped in Z-grade dreck, I’d be peeved too.

CHICAGO – It’s taken quite a few movies for me to warm up to Chris Messina. Perhaps it wasn’t his fault that he kept getting typecast as oafish, self-absorbed jerks. In my review of Dana Adam Shapiro’s flawed Oscilloscope release, “Monogamy,” I confessed that every time Messina’s face showed up onscreen, I was “suddenly filled with the intense desire to punch it.”

CHICAGO – There are good movies, there are bad movies, and then there are the movies that are just strangely non-existent. The Kevin James comedy “Here Comes the Boom,” recently released on DVD and Blu-ray, falls into that gap in-between. The movie has a good heart but it’s so predictable that its complete lack of real humor leaves it just bland. There’s nothing horribly wrong with “Boom” but there’s nothing to praise either. It is mediocre in every way and will appeal to only hardcore fans of James or MMA.

CHICAGO – Warner Brothers is using their 100th anniversary to release a series of special Blu-ray and DVD box sets that would make great gifts for the movie lover in your life. To be fair, a number of films in the latest box, “Best of Warner Bros. 20 Film Collection: Musicals” are available in stellar Blu-ray editions and that should be the way to go if you can but for the standard-only movie fan in your life or someone who doesn’t own any of these 20 (mostly) classics, it’s a stellar starter set for musical history.

CHICAGO – I know I’ve said this before but the season premiere of TNT’s “Southland,” airing tonight at 9pm CST, feels even darker than last year or the year before. It could be just a show trying to top itself in terms of edgy subject matter but it feels genuine here, like the show is increasingly reflecting our darker times.

CHICAGO – From “The Broadway Melody” to “The Departed,” Warner Bros. has collected twenty of their most beloved films in one DVD box set called “Best of Warner Bros. 20 Film Collection: Best Pictures.” Yes, all 20 films in this set on 23 discs won the Oscar for Best Picture. What better way to lead up to the upcoming 2013 Academy Awards than to burn through 20 of the past winners?

CHICAGO – Benoît Jacquot is a director clearly enraptured by the beauty of young women. This was eminently clear in his early ’90s-era vehicles for Virginie Ledoyen (“A Single Girl,” “Marianne”), an actress who turned up in his latest picture, “Farewell, My Queen,” still looking startlingly youthful. Yet she is no longer the center of Jacquot’s universe.

CHICAGO – Did everyone know that the great Guillermo Del Toro (“Pan’s Labyrinth”) is an expert on Alfred Hitchcock? So much so that he wrote a book on the legendary director and was asked by The Criterion Collection to do a wonderful interview on Hitch’s 1934 version of “The Man Who Knew Too Much”? Del Toro wonderfully expounds on the film, offering his insight as to how the work that would be remade into a more popular Jimmy Stewart film in later years actually represents the perfect transitional piece from Hitch’s British period to his American one. It’s just one of several great special features on another stellar Criterion release.

CHICAGO – Outside of a surprising Golden Globe win by its hysterically funny star, Matt LeBlanc, Showtime’s “Episodes” doesn’t seem to be getting too much attention from critics or viewers. It’s not one of the modern cable shows that everyone seems to be talking about like “Breaking Bad,” “Homeland,” “The Walking Dead,” “Justified,” etc. I’m not saying it’s in the caliber of those programs but it would be a shame if this program was ignored entirely. It’s damn funny.