Winding down with ‘I Dream of Jeannie,’ ‘Ozzie & Harriet’

The secret to aging artfully as a long-running sitcom? Be animated. The Simpsons just keeps going and going because, like comic book heroes who were born decades earlier, the characters barely age yet can be tweaked to accomodate changing times.

Not so with live-action sitcoms such as The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet, which spanned 14 seasons from 1952-1966, and I Dream of Jeannie, which first captured charm in a bottle in 1965, then wound down after five seasons in 1970.

Jeannie’s fifth and final season reaches DVD Tuesday from Sony, along with Shout Factory’s second box-set compilation of Ozzie & Harriet episodes, Best of Ricky and Dave. And in each case, you see where an ageless and time-stuck Simpsons bent might have helped.

Jeannie in year five is still a spry fantasy comedy, and Barbara Eden is as gorgeous as ever in the title role of a bottled genie who was released by Tony Nelson, a dutiful astronaut smartly played by Larry Hagman before his Dallas devilry. As his secret live-in companion, she still plays magical havoc with his ordered domestic and professional life — in Florida, not in Houston (part of the fantasy) — and he’s resisted her charms until, finally, something had to give, and it does, in Season Five, with a wedding in the 11th episode. Unfortunately, there’s scant romance as the story’s focus goes to the sitcom “sit” of Jeannie’s image not showing up on wedding photographs. With national magazine photogs hovering, what will they do? Sounds like vampires not showing up in mirrors, but no pictures is a genie rule, it seems.

As with Moonlighting, which also spanned five seasons, once the ”will they or won’t they?” went “poof!,” there was no place left to go. Jeannie ended after its marrying season, having amassed 139 episodes. Happily, all are on DVD. Astronaut Nelson, your mission is accomplished.

Over on Ozzie & Harriet, things were able to evolve more slowly and naturally, since the Nelson familly — also including sons Dave and Ricky — basically played themselves and grew up and grew older before America’s eyes, with the real-world people gradually evolving as the scripted characters.

Younger brother Ricky, or Rick, turned out to be the teen idol of the siblings, and he launched his singing career on the show with help from his dad, who also often wrote, directed and produced. In fact, Ozzie has been credited by some with creating the first rock videos.

The new box set highlights many of Ricky’s music performances, which are part of the episodes but also can be viewed separately. Like the show itself — one of the most white-bread series you’ll find — the songs were tame by pop and even early rock ‘n’ roll standards, yet they did include such tuneful hits as Fools Rush In, Hello Mary Lou and That’s All.

But after 14 years, even mid-’60s color episodes (two are in this set) couldn’t keep the family going forever, and Ozzie and Harriet bowed out after 435 episodes.

In case you’re wondering, that’s still more shows than The Simpsons, which is now up to 420 episodes. But it won’t be long before the adventures of Homer and Marge eclipse those of Ozzie and Harriet, at least in sheer numbers.

Still, the latter two had an incredible run, so give them credit. But if they’d been animated — well, Ricky probably would still be singing – though in a fresher style – and Ozzie would still be flummoxed by lost keys and missed appointments. Of course, new voice actors would have been needed eventually, since David Nelson is now the family’s only surviving member. But on DVD — and that’s a beauty of the medium — Ozzie, Harriet, Tony and Jeannie, just like Homer and Marge, are eternal.

‘Superhero Movie’ spots the spoof

If you’re a fan of the Naked Gun, Scary Movie and Airplane sendups, as I am, then you know that low-rent, low-brow silliness aimed at genre conventions can be as funny as many big-budgeted Hollywood movies (The Love Guru, anyone?).

That’s not to say Dimension’s Superhero Movie, new on DVD Tuesday, isn’t more of a cliche than a clobberin’ time triumph, but its very familiarity (the lovably deadpan Leslie Nielsen) and its worthy targets make it nutty and funny enough in its unassuming, minor-cast way – though a little late in the game given its slavish devotion to 2002’s first Spider-Man. That puts it almost as behind the curve as Spaceballs was to Star Wars — well, six years late, compared to Mel Brooks’ 10.

Nonetheless, Superhero Movie is an enjoyable enough spoof, and it’s reasonably well produced for this sort of thing, unlike the painfully plodding 305, also reaching DVD Tuesday, and its leaden lunacy aimed at 300. Granted, 305 was shot waaaay on the cheap, but there are limits.

Best of all for Superhero Movie and fans of spirited spoofs, this film is rippling with one especially good guilty pleasure — and I do mean guilty.

We’re talking Robert Joy, lately of CSI: NY, as Dr. Stephen Hawking, a wheelchair-bound paralyzed scientist who’s very much supposed to be confused with the real and revered physicist of the same name.

This type of comedy requires running jokes like we all require running water, and Joy’s Hawking provides the best of them, whether revealing his leering lustfulness inappropriately, or getting bashed and banged around — even stung by a swarm of bees — when his wheelchair is sent careening off-course — calamaties always followed by his monotone machinelike voice repeating curse words dispassionately.

Now, this is a guilty pleasure for a very good reason: Hawking is a great man, and we shouldn’t find humor in his affliction. But one of the functions of nonsensical films like this is to take you away from reality with its sheer zaniness, so it’s not as if we’re laughing at Hawking so much as laughing at the dark humor derived from his surrogate’s fanciful discomfiture.

I know, I know — that doesn’t get us — or me, at least — off the hook. But again, it’s Joy who provides the joy of that footage, not the thought of a truly great man truly suffering in any way.

There — I feel better. Guilty pleasure conquered. Now where’s that parody of Mother Teresa?

‘Bleeding Love’ + ‘So You Think You Can Dance’ = Art

Entertainment is known for many things, from posturing wannabes to hyped product, from the overcooked to the overrated. But that doesn’t mean maybe, just maybe, if we’re attentive, savvy and fully appreciative, we can’t come across the occasional gem which isn’t just entertainment, but is art.

Such was the case last night on Fox’s So You Think You Can Dance, a show which stretches the limits of what constitutes dancing artistry far more than the higher-rated and more celeb-slavish Dancing With the Stars, apart from the latter’s free-style nights. In this case, it was So You Think’s best dance of the season, and perhaps its best dance ever. And it was hip hop.

Now, I’m no hip hop fan. I’m a rocker. That’s it. I believe in rock. I trust rock. I know what rock can do at its finest, and I know there’s damn near half a century of incredible nuggets in rock’s goldmine. But this dance by Chelsie and Mark — this hip-hop interpretation of a moving song (Leona Lewis’ Bleeding Love) and a stirring theme (choreographers Napoleon and Tabitha’s tale of a desperately in love woman being spurned by her work-obsessed man) – was one of the finest moments of pure dance, pure artistry and pure heart I’ve seen in many a moon.

Everything about it was right, and best of all, it had an emotional depth that’s always lacking — always — in the kind of fluff that passes most often as mass-market entertainment, and which we slurp up either because we buy it, which we shouldn’t, or because there are so few worthy alternatives.

If you missed it, thankfully, you can still check it out. No need for me to say any more and risk sounding hype-driven myself. Just consider this your good tip for the day — and enjoy.

‘Spiderwick’ is a product of meager imagination

I realize that The Spiderwick Chronicles, new on DVD from Paramount, is based on a series of books, and I realize it also follows hugely popular children’s fantasies such as the Harry Potter and Narnia movies, and all these things dictate that it play out in a certain way.

Nonetheless, while watching the film, I kept thinking about a comparable woodland fantasy involving children which, in a big way, puts Spiderwick to shame. I know it’s an unreasonable comparison given Spiderwick’s source novels and its marketing imperatives — I know, I know — but dang, the film pales next to a movie it clumsily evokes, Pan’s Labyrinth.

You see, that Spanish masterpiece spoiled me. Its impecable artistry, its haunting music and mood, its rivetting performances, its less feverish and more eerily compelling creatures — all combine to make Guillermo del Toro’s three-time Oscar winner a classic picture. Spiderwick? It’s product.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the cast and appreciated the setup, with flashbacks to David Strathairn as a charming scientist/dad who discovers unseen creatures roiling in the woods around his remote house. (His tragic back-story about Tampering Where No Man Should even reminded me of some beloved old Outer Limits episodes, such as Don’t Open Till Doomsday and The Bellero Shield.)

I was less enthused, yet tolerant, of the woefully cliched modern fractured family of a solo mom and three kids (Strathairn’s descendants) who are all about strident, bitter rancor and resentment. They are not about appreciating that they have food to eat, a roof over their heads, wondrous woods to explore and each other. What miserable folks with whom to spend a movie. But hey — at least they’re flesh and blood.

As for the creatures, they’re cartoons — well, CG — and thus have very little   impact in an otherwise live-action flick. I mean, they’re just too absurd — like Muppets gone bad. And once the creatures appear and the action begins, Spiderwick, for me, is just another empty CG-driven flick that’s all about flashy action and has precious little to do with storytelling, character development, mood, ambience or meaning — you know, the little things.

That said, if you’re a Potter/Narnia/you-name-it fan of child-geared fantasy, and you need a fix, Spiderwick will do. Heck, it’s even got a cameo by Lady Olivier, that is, Joan Plowright, whose former husband was perhaps the greatest actor of the 20th Century, and she’s still  going strong. But Freddie Highmore’s self-obsessed, reckless, resentful, hateful protagonist — and the absurd CG creatures he meets — well, you can have them.

As for me, I’ve got a good reason to watch Pan’s Labyrinth again, if only as a more heartening reminder of the huge difference between films that are slavish product and those that aspire to art.

 

 

 

‘Lost’ Chicago album is a found mixed bag

I love B-sides. I love hearing unreleased tracks as bonus elements on a CD or a boxed set. I love finding heretofore “lost” albums which finally find the light of day. I love music such as Lindsey Buckingham’s Gift of Screws album, which never got a label release yet provided strong songs for Fleetwood Mac such as Steal Your Heart Away and Bleed to Love Her.

So you’d think Chicago’s “lost” album, Stone of Sisyphus, would be right up my alley — especially since it reportedly was nixed by its label when it proved to be an adventurous throwback to Chicago’s edgy, experimental jazz-rock sounds from its first two double-length long-players.

As it turns out, though, Stone of Sisyphus, while a good try, is no CTA or the self-titled second Chicago album. Rather, it’s often guilty of forced departures simply for the sake of shaking things up, as with a lamentable rap track called Sleeping in the Middle of the Bed. And mixed with those pointed departures (you’d think Chicago was in the mode of the Monkees making Headquarters), the band is still prone to sissiness, all right, if not a proverbial stone of Sisyphus. You want wimpy MOR Chicago songs in keeping with its commercial penchant? You’ve got those, too, and given the fresher context, they feel jarringly out of place.

Yet even with the schizoid posturing and the confusion, there’s some excellent music here. It’s also good to hear echoes of the group’s politically charged origins, via All the Years, with its sounds of students chanting “The whole world’s watching” at the 1968 Democratic Party convention in Chicago. Heck, I even like da funk of Mah-Jong.

Yet while this 1993 “lost” album is finally found and is rightfully embraced, let’s not get too carried away. It’s not the original Chicago – it’s not Terry Kath — because it can’t be, and it shouldn’t be.  But it is a fine record from a worthy band who deserved better than having to wait years for its release.

Sometimes I think record labels deserve more respect than they get. That certainly applies to Rhino right now, by getting this album to the public. But Warner Bros. in ‘93? They blew it, just as they did with Lindsey Buckingham years later. Sometimes the artist is right and the label was wrong. This is one of those times.  

 

Duchovny’s ‘Californication’ may grow on you

Coming so soon after The TV Set, Californication — David Duchovny’s Showtime series about a disillusioned writer in La-La’s shark-infested waters — seemed at first overly familiar. But the show, whose 12 first-season episodes hit DVD Tuesday from CBS and Paramount, is much more.

Actually, it starts as less, in that the first couple of episodes are all about how shiftless, writer-block-hit novelist Hank Moody (Duchovny), who flourished back home on the East Coast but is aghast at L.A.’s warped movie biz, is not only God’s gift to writing but also God’s gift to women. Everyone talks about him like he’s the best thing ever to touch a keyboard, and women flock to him as if he’s People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive. For such scenes, the Austin Powers-style crotch shielding is an inadvertent joke.

But for all his sexual conquests, Hank is unhappy. He can’t write for these Hollywood creeps, and he’s estranged from his girlfriend (Natascha McElhone), who’s also the mother of his young daughter (Madeleine Martin), a budding rocker with Bettie Page bangs. The guy has grown up enough to know that’s where he belongs: with the two leading ladies of his life.

Hank is desperate to reconnect, but not so desperate that he’ll turn down the bedmate of the moment. This gets awfully monotonous and contrived, making Hank seem more virile and desirable than Warren Beatty in Shampoo – and flattering the hell out of Duchovny. (Poor Tea, to have to watch this.)

But the show soon takes off, by exploring Hank’s relationships. Most of all, it sings with soulfulness given the fact that Californication, in its tarnished Hollywood heart of hearts, is about one glorious thing that doesn’t get nearly enough screen time. It’s about chivalry. Hank loves women — loves them — and he does what he can to protect and comfort them (while also having hanky-panky fun in the process).

Last time I checked, the last movie or series to champion this ancient quality was Sin City, albeit in an entirely different vein of fantasy violence. Californication’s fantasies spring more from its small-world contrivances and the obsessive and kinky horniness of everyone on screen, a uniformity as absurd and simple-minded as it is in Boston Legal. But like that show, this one rings with zingers in its dialogue, as it rips the phoniness of overrated Tinseltown product disguised as art, and that of so many people who aren’t honest with themselves, much less others.

I know that I’m hooked, and I eagerly await season two this fall. Until then, skip the kind of entertainment Hank rightly calls “more empty than a Michael Bay joint” and check out this witty diatribe on our junk-food pop culture and those who purvey it. Like Hank as he hungers for his ladies, you just might find yourself falling in love.

 

 

‘Meerkat Manor’ beats any soap

The drama! The danger! The intrigue! The romance! The rivalries! We’re not talking soap operas but Meerkat Manor, whose Season Three scurries to DVD Tuesday from Animal Planet. And is this, or is it not, one of the finest animal kingdom shows ever?

As someone who reveres all kinds of critters, especially as their habitats worldwide shrink, I know this show hits me in my heart, and on my funnybone. Besides, it’s got Sam himself — er, Sean Astin — as narrator, after an earlier turn at that task by the great Bill Nighy. I mean, can a show be more classy than that? Well, it would be tough. But enough from me. Get your heads up and scan the horizon — those discs should be popping up from a burrow at any moment now.

 

 

‘The Signal’ should be turned on, not off

New on DVD June 10 from Magnolia, The Signal is a bold little horror-comedy, if only because it so shamelessly — yet effectively — steals from other films, lacing elements of The Ring (a TV-sparked signal launches disaster) into a movie whose tone shifts from the tragic world-ending horror of 28 Days Later to the bizarre dark comedy of Shaun of the Dead.

The best part is the humor, smack dab in the middle of a film clearly designed as a three-act story by the three men who wrote and directed each segment, shooting in Atlanta and calling their fantasy town Terminus. Flashbacks and creative editing stitch the stories together by alternating between characters’ perspectives.

It seems a strangely garbled TV signal has sparked a plague of maniacal murdering in almost all of humanity (think zombie movies, but with no living-dead shambles) and only a few folks are unaffected. These include two star-crossed lovers who become separated and, as in Cloverfield, spend most of the movie winding their way toward reconnecting.

The love story is rather lame; I don’t think the three writer-directors have a clue, and their romance is meaningful only because the script says so. But when it comes to ghoulish horror and twisted humor, they know their stuff, especially in Act II.

Then, the protagonists’ paths cross those of a chirpy middle class couple who have planned a New Year’s Eve party. And even though bloody corpses are piling up everywhere, they dutifully try to “act natural” and keep up a bravely convivial front. One must be a good host, after all.

Beyond such mirth, the film is rather bleak, but then, that’s its premise. And it should be. You could argue that all of us, while so hopelessly plugged into our TVs, computers, cells and other masturbatory gadgets, are an accident waiting to happen, even if that accident is a deadly signal which unleashes murderous madness. With our slavish devotion to self-indulgent fixations on technology, we’re certainly ripe for it. (Stephen King took his own stab in his book The Cell.) Just don’t forget to supply the party favors. You never know when someone with a sledge hammer will ring your doorbell, and you wouldn’t want to disappoint them. 

Sophia Loren not timeless, but she is precious

OK, so Sophia Loren’s 73. So she’s getting up there. So she’s no longer the Italian sex symbol who captivated filmgoers in frisky roles starting decades ago. But hey, she’s still Sohia Loren – a classy lady and a fine actress whon is still getting parts, the next one being for movie musical Nine, due next year.

Meanwhile, you can catch some of her early work in a new four-film Sophia Loren Collection from Lions Gate, due June 10, featuring Neapolitan Carousel, Attila, Madame Sans-Gene and Sunflower.

Then you can look forward to Nine, directed by Chicago’s Rob Marshall. It will be Loren’s first film in five years and one of the few she’s done in the past decade-plus.

Happily, I shared some screen time with her in one of those few, 1994’s Pret-a-Porter (aka Ready to Wear) from director Robert Altman. For his fashion-focused comedy laced with a flimsy murder mystery and goosed by an all-star cast, Loren and longtime co-star Marcello Mastroianni played former lovers from Rome who, after many years, reconnect against the backdrop of Parisian fashion shows.

One such show involved fictional designer Cort Romney, played with foppish humor by Richard Grant and using designs actually created by the real deal, Vivienne Westwood. To shoot the Cort Romney show’s runway scenes for the film, cast and crew assembled at a chateau in the countryside not far from Paris, where the big-scale production worked for two days.

I was there for both days. I’d planned a vacation in Europe to coincide with the shoot, and Altman and company set it up in an ideal give-and-take way. For two days, the press — mostly Europeans — could cover the shoot, while also being in it. We’d play the fashion journalists attending Romney’s show.

So for two days, while models strutted and stars preened in closeups, I sat in the second row of the audience just behind a legend at any age — Sophia Loren – who wore a large hat which largely obscured me. Oh, you can catch glimpses of me here and there, along with better looks at the person next to me, my wife, who was, in fact, a fashion journalist, and had the sense to steer us to the best seats when the shoot began.

I never spoke to Ms. Loren — she seemed so regal, and I hated to bother her. But I did meet many other actors on the shoot, from Grant, Stephen Rea and Tracey Ullman to Sally Kellerman, Harry Belafonte, Lyle Lovett and Danny Aiello. What an experience. Spent one off-hour on a picnic blanket behind the chateau with Kellerman, Rea, Everett and Linda Hunt, while Everett sang Broadway show songs and we all had a laugh. Filmmaking is slow and tedious work, but the camaraderie among those on a shoot can be a wonderful thing. And with Ms. Loren, just admiring her from afar — or close up – was enough for me.

 

‘Rambo’ and ‘Indy 4′ show the overaged overcompensating

Back in the ’70s, National Lampoon magazine ran a classic mock ad showing a VW floating in a pond with the caption, “If Ted Kennedy drove a Volkswagen, he’d be president today.” (If you don’t know the dark humor of this, do your homework and get back to me.) Similarly, and somewhat conversely, if Arnold Schwarzenegger had not been elected governor of California, we’d most likely be wincing through movies with Ah-nuld flexing his aging muscles as a 60-plus-year-old action hero. As it is, he’s too busy being the governator to make much monotonous mayhem in the movies — and that’s a relief.

But he could have been. After all, Harrison Ford, 65, has just done it in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. And even before that, Sylvester Stallone, 61, did it in Rambo, which is new to DVD and comes to us 20 years after Rambo III. (For all us nostalgia hounds, it’s also available in Rambo: The Complete Collectors Set, a handsome tin featuring all four of the vengeful soldier’s movies.)

Now, I’m no age-ist. In fact, I’m the opposite. I believe people get better in many ways as they get older. But I’m not so sure that being a movie action hero is one of those ways. I mean, Ford looked downright grandfatherly in Indy 4, but the movie made a big deal of how, instead, he was merely fatherly. You’d think he was 45, not 65. 

And, as so often happens in such cases, oldsters tend to overcompensate.

Ford has never been more masculine, virile, strong and indomitable than in Indy 4, disregarding the facts that (1) he’s much older and (2) Indy’s charm, in his ’80s heyday, sprang in large part from his regular-guy vulnerability. And Stallone’s John Rambo reportedly kills 236 opponents in Rambo, the most in any film of the series. Over the hill? Not when you overcompensate, I guess.

I also guess this means if Ah-nuld wasn’t governator, he’d be slaughtering at an almost genocidal rate in Terminator 4 or somesuch — and we wouldn’t be enjoying it. So before you bemoan the runaway production he’s prompted (you know what I’m talking about, industry types), let’s be thankful for small favors. Between Rambo and Indy 4, at least there was no Commando 6.