Sex At 24 Frames Per Second

I ran into this DVD while looking around at Wills recently.  It was put out by Playboy, but it also has the AMC logo on it as well.  The DVD attempts to provide a history of sex in the cinema.  Not a whole lot of time is spent on the early days, but there are a few snippets from early silent films that helped lead to the creation of the Hayes Code and the Breen Production Code.  These self censoring production codes were enforced to prevent the government from stepping in and to assuage the Catholic church. 

As we move into the 30s the film looks at film noir and the use of double entendre to deal with sexual matters.  Since sex could not be shown, Hollywood sexualized the cigarette for example.  More time is spent on the post production code films of the 60s onward.  Plenty of scenes from Unfaithful are shown as are several scenes from Fatal Attraction.  Although Last Tango in Paris is mentioned, the infamous butter scene is not included. 

The film is a nice overview of sex in films, but I would have much preferred a more detailed decade by decade set than the fast paced 101 minutes the entirety of the 20th century is given in this film.  The movie also claims that now that “the genie is out of the bottle” in regards to sex in the movies, that it can never be put back in, but this ignores all the recent fights that have taken place between the MPAA and filmmakers.  Angel Heart was trimmed to get an R as was Eyes Wide Shut several years ago and there have been a string of other films that have faced the same battle.  The only place the genie has free reign seems to be on the DVD, and even then American audiences have yet to be given the uncut Eyes Wide Shut. 

I also would have liked to have seen more information on a few recent groundbreaking films like The Brown Bunny, Shortbus, and Scarlet Diva.  Unfortunately Shortbus was released 3 years after this documentary and The Brown Bunny came out the same year as the documentary.   As a “Cliff Notes” overview, I give Sex at 24 Frames Per Second 3 stars.  Enjoyable fluff, but not detailed enough to be truly educational.

Blink 182: The Urethra Chronicles II Harder, Faster. Faster, Harder

I like a lot of different styles of music.  I often joke that my music collection has Garth Brooks sitting side by side with the Butthole Surfers, but it’s true.  I listen to most varieties of music and enjoy the majority of them.  The thing is I don’t take my music habit as seriously as my movie habit.  I can tell you casts and directors and trivia and quotes from hundreds of different films, but I have a hard time even telling you the names of half the songs on any CD that I own.  I don’t know the names of most of the members of any of the bands I like.  I also have a difficult time remembering the lyrics to songs unless it happens to be one of John Valby’s, and even then I may not get them right.

I have a few music DVDs, but for the most part, unless it’s a concert, they don’t really do a lot for me.  There are exceptions of course.  I love Bitchcraft from Rock Bitch which provides behind the scenes footage with lots of concert footage and kick ass hard rock.  I also love my Buffett DVDs.  But Blink 182: The Urethra Chronicles II Harder, Faster. Faster, Harder proves exactly what I’m saying.  I enjoy the music of Blink 182, but I couldn’t sing one of their songs if my life depended on it with the possible exception of The Dog Song which was a hidden bonus track on certain copies of Take Off Your Pants And Jacket.  When someone reminds me, I can recall that the band consists of Travis Barker, Mark Hoppus and Tom DeLonge, but don’t ask me to name them if I haven’t been reading up on them lately.

The Urethra Chronicles II is more for the die-hard fans than it is for someone like me who just likes the music.  The video consists of several sections introducing the band members and showing them touring and making videos is support of their Take Off Your Pants And Jacket CD.  They discuss how they had to change the video of Stay Together For The Kids after the events of September 11, 2001, but I would have preferred a more direct side by side comparison of the two videos.  Both versions are included as a bonus feature, but if the event is this important, give it a clearer contrast.  As I said, this is a video for the fans, not for someone looking for a serious band documentary.

The DVD does seem rather ironic to me in one respect.  At the end of the DVD, Tom is talking about how the three of them are all such great friends.  They’re all like brothers, he states, and it will always be this way.  About 3 years later Tom quit the band and reportedly changed his phone number so that the other two members couldn’t call him.  Urethra Chronicles II gets a 6 1/2 on the Night Flight scale.

Lenny

After watching Chicago and All That Jazz with my daughter, we decided to watch Lenny as well.  The first time I saw Lenny was on HBO and I fell in love with both the movie and the talent that was Lenny Bruce.  Lenny wasn’t just a talented comedian.  He was a true warrior for freedom of speech.  One thing I value highly is my first amendment right to free speech.  I stick up for people’s right to say what they want even if I disagree with them.  I support the ACLU and I buy books and cds that  get threatened with bans and censorship.  I love free speech, but I don’t know that I could have done what Lenny did, risking job loss and imprisonment.  God bless Lenny Bruce.

Lenny is played in the movie by Dustin Hoffman, and Hoffman becomes Lenny Bruce.  This is one of those films where the actor so perfectly captures the person they are portraying that you lose all trace of the actor.  Jim Carrey did this with Andy Kaufman as well in Man On The Moon. 

Lenny was directed by Bob Fosse and the film plays out like a documentary.  The actors portraying people in Lenny’s life are interviewed just as the people would be in a real documentary.  Lenny’s stand-up performances are also perfectly captured by Hoffman and Fosse. 

Lenny is one of the films that changed my life and the way I looked at the world.  It helped to forge my view on language and how it can be used to convey many different things.  Lenny is another 4 star film, and one I can’t recommend highly enough.

The Phandom Menace

No that’s not a typo in the title.  This is a documentary about Australian Star Wars fans awaiting the Australian premiere of Episode One: The Phantom Menace.  I was about 13 years old when Star Wars came out.  I loved it, and sat through countless repeat viewings.  I sat in line with Valerie Austin, Suzanne Higgins and Wayne Bailey to get in to the first showing of The Empire Strikes Back, and then we stayed over and watched it a second time.  I went to the midnight premiere screening of Phantom Menace at Marquee Cinemas with my wife, my son, and my best friend.  I have a touch of the Star Wars geek in me, but the people in this film often seem to have lost touch with reality.

Seeing these people in their Star Wars costumes and looking at their massive collections and special Star Wars rooms in their homes makes me think that maybe I’m not as crazy as I sometimes think I am.  Never the less I can handle that.  These people have a passion for Star Wars.  I have 5860+ DVDs scattered about my living room.  It’s all levels of craziness.  The thing I found so embarrassing were the guys saying how Phantom Menace was going to be the best film ever.  Even worse was watching some of them defending and praising a film that most people tend to rate as the worst in the series.  To the credit of the documentary, the filmmakers did go back a few weeks later and the film’s über cheerleader that had declared the film perfect, gave a slightly more level-headed take on the film.

The Phandom Menace was released on DVD by Eclectic DVD who had released several other off the wall titles that I had purchased.  I actually picked it up because of these other titles.  That and the fact that I found it at a very cheap price.

The DVD is not the greatest documentary I have ever seen, but it does nicely capture that moment in time when Star Wars fandom was at its most recent high point.  At only 62 minutes I give The Phandom Menace a 6 1/2 on the Night Flight scale.

Saturday Night Live: Lost And Found – SNL In The 80s

Like most people of my generation, I loved Saturday Night Live during the first five years.  When the last of the original cast left along with Producer Lorne Michaels, I quit watching regularly.  To be fair, I was in high school when the new cast came on and I had better things to do than stay up and watch SNL.  There were midnight movies on Saturday and there were also late night D&D games. 

It wasn’t until several years later that I began watching SNL on a regular basis again.  Lorne was coming back and bringing an entire new cast with him as well.  I was living on my own and working a job that put me home just about in time for the show.  I watched a few weeks and decided that the new cast just wasn’t that great.  I soon stopped watching and didn’t return for a couple more years by which time my life had changed again, but so had the quality of the show.  I watched it and actually found sketches to laugh at because they were funny.  I think it was also around this time that I bought and read Backstage Saturday Night which covered the early years of the show up through Lorne’s return.  It was entertaining and very informative.  This was also about the time that Comedy Central, then known as The Comedy Channel I believe, started airing half hour or hour long “Best Of SNL” as well as full 90 minute replays of the show.  They even aired some of the short season that was the first new cast in season 6.  The shows were fascinating to look back on.

 Lost And Found SNL in the 80s is a documentary that was made for NBC covering the 10 years after the original cast left.  There are clips from the shows and the musical guests as well as interview with the cast, crew, and selected guests.  The documentary doesn’t mince words either.  Gilbert Gottfried, a season six regular, plainly states that their shows were awful, but he also points out that part of their problem was the writing.  No matter how funny you are, if the writing is lousy, you can’t be funny.

 After the debacle that was season 6, a new producer was hired and most of the season 6 cast was fired.  Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo were retained and Eddie shot into superstardom.  New producer Dick Ebersol also decided to up their talent pool by hiring established talents in Billy Crystal, Martin Short, and Christopher Guest.  Ebersol also started taping more segments of the show in advance.  When he finished season 10, he told NBC the only way he would stay on was if they agreed to tape the entire show, doing away with the live portion of Saturday Night Live.  NBC decided against that and instead talked Lorne Michaels into returning as producer.

Lorne also was allowed to hire an entire new crew of actors, and he did.  Many of his actors were also well-known performers; Anthony Michael Hall, Robert Downey Jr,, and Randy Quaid among them. Unfortunately the chemistry that the first cast had back in 75, wasn’t coming out with the new cast.  Lorne quickly went from the man who was coming back to save SNL, to the man who might be driving the final nail in its coffin.  He realized that part of what made SNL work in the early days was the fact that the performers knew each other and many of them had worked together before.  When he started retooling SNL for season 12, he began looking for performers that had worked together or that were friends.  The new cast pulled the show out of the grave and went on to several years of greatness.  Lorne began rotating people in and out to keep the show fresh, and to allow them to nurture talent like Mike Myers and Adam Sandler later on. 

Lost And Found SNL in the 80s is a fond look back at some of the worst years of the show.  I give it 3 ½ stars.  The DVD also features almost another hour and a half to two hours of bonus interviews and skits.  They look at censors, race, and other topics as it relates to the show.  Now I only hope that this December they will release the complete 6^th season on DVD.  The documentary gave me a taste, but I want to see it all.  I also hope they release it with the Charlene Tilton episode uncut and just the way it aired on the East coast.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: A Family Portrait Revisited

I remember hearing about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre as a kid.  I was told that it was the scariest film ever made by some friends that had also never seen it.  In junior high school I recall one of the other students describing a scene from it in great detail.  The only problem was he had the wrong movie.  He was discussing a scene from Last House on the Left.  The scene where one of the killers gets oral sex by the pool with way too much teeth.  There is no oral sex in Texas Chainsaw and no biting off of any genitalia.  Texas Chainsaw returned to theaters while I was in high school and Valerie Austin and I went to see it.  This was in the wake of Friday the 13th.  With Texas Chainsaw’s reputation and the gore factor in Friday being so high, I was expecting blood and guts and gore and chainsaws cutting through flesh and bone. Needless to say, I was pretty disappointed.  The film was dark and dirty and there was very little gore.  The sounds and the screaming were grating.  The meat hook scene was pretty well done, I thought, but the rest of the film couldn’t live up to the images my mind had produced over the previous 5 years.

Several years later I revisited The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and I was able to watch it without any grandiose preconceived idea as to how scary and gory it was going to be.  I liked it much better this time, although I still thought it was over-rated.  I picked up a copy of the movie on VHS and I also sprang for an original one-sheet from the film which hung over my bed in Huntington for the longest time.  When Chainsaw came out on DVD, I bought a copy of the Pioneer release at Cheap Thrills.  I later picked up a couple more later releases of the film including the two disc steelbook edition.

The other day while checking out DVDs at KV Fine Jewelry and Loan in St. Albans, I noticed the back of a DVD case.  When I flipped it around, I found it was a DVD documentary on Texas Chainsaw.  Brad Shellady had interviewed all four members of the original family.  It was quite interesting.

John Dugan, who played Grandpa, looked a lot like Eric Bogosian out from under the thick layers of makeup.  I was surprised at how young he truly was.  He was 34 when Chainsaw was released, but his character is easily in his eighties or later.  Dugan discusses many things including the makeup process and the finger sucking scene.  He says Tobe Hooper instructed him to shake his arms and legs like a baby that is so happy to be nursing.  Dugan also lets us in on how his life has been going since Chainsaw, although almost accidentally.  He is discussing how so many people love Chainsaw and how almost anyone could claim to have played Grandpa due to the heavy makeup, when he mentions that at work he told this other waiter that he was in Chainsaw and was going to be interviewed by Shellady for the documentary.  His point was how this other waiter was such a fan of Chainsaw.  My thought was, “Oh my God, the man who played Grandpa is working as a waiter some place”.

Jim Siedow, the cook, was in both Chainsaw 1 and 2.  His character in Chainsaw was almost normal in some scenes.  Siedow seems to be a very likable and mild-mannered guy.  He talks about having to actually hit Marilyn Burns in one scene and he kept hitting her too lightly.

Edwin Neal played the hitchhiker, one of the more flamboyant characters in the film.  Neal is also one of the most entertaining people that they interviewed.  He talks about having worked as a comic and he recounts several incidents from the filming with a perfect storyteller’s skill.  What he doesn’t discuss, and that I found incredibly interesting, is the number of roles he has performed since Texas Chainsaw.  Don’t get me wrong, he let’s you know that he has been working and that he has had a variety of roles, but with the exception of Future-Kill, he doesn’t mention any of these roles by names.  It’s too bad, because among his roles was super-baddie Lord Zedd from Power Rangers, the voice of Dr. Robotnik from Sonic The Hedgehog: The Movie, and many other horror films and Japanese movies and anime.  This man would have been one of my son’s idols if he knew who he was.

The final member of the family is the most iconic, Gunnar Hansen, who played Leatherface.  Gunnar also comes off as a very peaceful person despite his character’s love for inflicting pain.  Hansen is also very vocal about his unhappiness with people who only know of his work in this film.  He alludes to other, more positive things he does, but either he never opens up about what they are, or the director chose not to include them.  Hansen has done several other films, mostly in the horror genre.  He and Edwin Neal both were in the ultra-violent Murder-Set-Pieces, a film that had 22 minutes cut to attain an R rating, and he was in one of my guilty pleasures, Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers, with my favorite scream queen, Linnea Quigley.

One thing that every single one of these guys recalls quite vividly was the horrible conditions and the 26 hour shoot that was the dinner table scene.  The sequence used lots of real bones, real meats, and even a real chicken’s head that began to decompose, rot, and stink to high heaven as the day got hotter and longer.  At one point, Siedow recalls a crew member injecting formaldehyde into some sausages to try to keep them from exploding on the set.

Another interesting anecdote from these guys was the fact that they were writing as they went on a lot of the film, and they kept trying to figure out a way to get Marilyn’s blouse torn off.  Ultimately they didn’t do it because Tobe Hooper was worried about getting it shown on television.  As they point out in the trivia section of the DVD, Hooper was hoping to get a PG rating.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: A Family Portrait Revisited is a must for any fan of the original Chainsaw.  It is still a very entertaining film for everyone else, especially people that enjoy finding out how movies are made.  I had heard the DVD was out of print, but Amazon had several copies for under $2, so horror fans should scoop up a copy.  One thing Shellady does a wonderful job of in this film is telling the story of the making of the movie from the tales of 4 different individuals without making it seem the least bit disjointed.  I highly recommend this documentary.  For Chainsaw fans, this is probably close to 4 stars.  For horror movie fans like myself, it’s probably 3 stars.  For everybody else, I would say it would still be entertaining and informative enough to rate 2 1/2 stars.

Monsters vs Aliens

I really wanted to see Monsters vs Aliens in 3D when it was out at the theater, but like so many movies, I missed it.  When it was released on DVD, it wasn’t 3D, so I felt no great rush to pick it up.  The other day I was at Wills and found a used copy for a couple of bucks.  I decided to get it and check it out.  I’m glad I did. 

Monsters vs Aliens is a cartoon, and it is a family film, but it is also a wonderful love letter to the fans of the old 1950’s monster movies.  Many of those films were made in 3D as well, which adds another layer to the homage.  The story is that the U.S. government has been capturing monsters and keeping them locked up since the 50s.  They have Dr. Cockroach, a humanoid cockroach ala The Fly.  There is BOB, a blue blob, and The Missing Link, a half man/half fish Creature from the Black Lagoon knock off.  Rounding out the monsters is Insectosaurus, a fuzzy Mothra type monster.  When the story opens, a new monster has just been added, Ginormica, or as she refers to herself, Susan.  At her wedding, Susan was hit by a meteor which bombarded her with a strange cosmic energy that caused her to grow to gigantic proportions.

An alien known as Gallaxhar wants the energy and decides to destroy the earth to get it.  The government believes the only way to stop the alien’s plan is to counter attack with monsters, so they set the monsters free to take down the alien invasion.  There are numerous scenes and snippets of dialogue that are winks to the old monster movies.  A shot of Ginormica using a syringe as a spear is taken from one of the Amazing Colossal Man movies while Gallaxhar’s exhortation to “Destroy All Monsters” is a reference to a 1968 Japanese monsterfest with Godzilla and crew.

Monsters vs Aliens is a beautifully animated film and is cleverly written.  The Dreamworks animation crew decided to go with well-known actors for the voices.  Reese Witherspoon, Hugh Laurie, Seth Rogen, Keifer Sutherland, Will Arnett, and Rainn Wilson voice the lead roles with Stephen Colbert, Amy Pohler, Jeffery Tambor, Paul Rudd, and Ed Helms among others pulling up minor roles.  I can only speculate about how this looked in 3D, but I would guess it was amazing.  Some of the scenes just scream out that they were planned for a 3D release including an end credits gag involving the president sticking his head out of the screen.       

The DVD provides a nice featurette about the making of the movie as a 3D experience.  It also has some deleted scenes that never got fully animated.

Monsters vs Aliens is a wonderful film that just happens to be family friendly.  I give it 3 stars.

Bill Maher Be More Cynical

Did you ever look at an old picture of someone and think, “Wow, they look totally different”?  Or maybe you see your son getting serious about a girlfriend and you think about how it was only a few short years ago that the only thing he was serious about was collecting Pokemon cards.  That’s the way I felt when I sat down to watch Bill Maher Be More Cynical.  Be More Cynical was shot in 2000 before the election.  Clinton was still in office.  We weren’t at war in Iraq or Afghanistan.  George W. Bush was a fairly unknown commodity.  The twin towers were still standing, and Bill Maher was still the host of Politically Incorrect. 

The world was a different place and so was Bill.  Many of the more controversial stances he would take were not fully formed or else were hidden because of the state of the world and his presence as a late night network talk show host.  He discusses in the show how the network forbade them from making jokes about drugs.  They had to make sure that nothing they did or said might possibly cause children to experiment with drugs.  He also had a toned-down approach to religion.  On Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO, Maher openly states that he is an atheist.  He even made a documentary with Larry Charles that dealt with the world’s religions and his stance as a non-believer.  During a section in Be More Cynical concerning religion it is shocking to hear him state, “I believe in God.”  Not because it’s such a radical concept, but because Maher has been so outspoken on his belief that there is not a God in recent years.

Another topic where Maher’s views have changed is on the subject of Al Gore.  In Be More Cynical Maher tells the audience that he “hate(s) Al Gore”, but during the run up to the 2008 election he spoke highly of Gore and even had him on the show to discuss climate change.

Of course people don’t watch a comedy special just to see how a performer has changed over the years.  They watch to laugh at the performer’s material.  So does Be More Cynical score in this area?  Yes, it does.  Maher is a gifted stand up in the tradition of Lenny Bruce and George Carlin that can mix social commentary with humor.  He has sections in his show dealing with then candidate Bush as well as then president Clinton, but he also has sections dealing with drugs and religion, as I mentioned, and with women and death among other topics. 

This was one of Maher’s earliest stand up shows for HBO.  His next special was Victory Begins at Home which was filmed 3 years later.  I picked it up at Big Lots but haven’t gotten around to watching it yet.  I figure I’ll be catching it fairly soon while this performance is still fresh in my mind just so I can compare.

Bill Maher Be More Cynical gets a pretty solid 9 on the Night Flight scale.  It’s a funny show, and it’s also helped by the nostalgia factor for a time when we were more concerned with the sexual indiscretions of the commander-in-chief and had a booming economy as opposed to today where the economy is in the toilet and people have to make up presidential controversies (the birthers for example) because no one has gotten a blow job in the White House since Clinton left office.

Videodrome

I saw Videodrome when it was first released and it blew me away.  I didn’t completely understand it, but I still loved it.  The effects were revolutionary for the time and the idea that a person could be turned into a human video player that could be controlled by what was on a tape inserted into their body was mind-boggling.  I did some trading and managed to get the one sheet for this film and it hung over my bed for years.  Several years later I recall finding out that the film was available as an unrated DVD.  I began searching for it, but kept running into the R rated version.  Finally I found a used copy at FYE.  I was ecstatic.  Then I found out Criterion had released a two disc edition packed with all sorts of goodies.  I stumbled across that at FYE as well and added it to my collection.  It had been several years since my last viewing of Videodrome, and I had never checked out either of the DVDs I had purchased, so today I popped the original unrated Universal DVD into my player.

I was surprised at how much of the film I had forgotten.  There were scenes I just did not recall.  And these weren’t the scenes that had been added to the uncut DVD.  I also couldn’t help but marvel at the pronouncement of one of the characters, Professor Brian O’Blivion.  He states that O’Blivion is not his birth name, that it is his television name.  He then states that soon everyone will have television names.  Well, he was half right.  Most people these days have a screen name, but it is for the computer, albeit often for video blogs which is similar to television.

Videodrome stars James Woods as Max Renn, a sleazy cable channel operator that is looking for something edgier than the soft core porn he has been airing.  He stumbles across Videodrome, a television program with no plot except sexual torture.  He is hooked and his new partner, Deborah Harry, becomes intrigued as well.  She is into pain as a form of pleasure showing Max scars where other boyfriends had cut her at her request.  She offers to show Max a few things and soon he is sticking needles into her ear lobes.  Max has one other major change in his life.  He has started having headaches coupled with hallucinations.

David Cronenberg has often been described as a “body horror” filmmaker, and Videodrome takes this to new levels.  Max develops a giant slit in his abdomen where a gun can be hidden, or a living video tape inserted.  It’s hard to tell where Max’s dreams begin and reality ends.  One scene has him grabbing his secretary and slapping her only to watch her turn into Debbie Harry and then back with another slap.  He apologizes for his reaction and then for hitting her, but she informs him he never did hit her.

The Universal DVD is light on extras.  There are a couple of the slide show production notes and cast bios as well as one of the theatrical trailers.  The Criterion edition is much more giving in the extras department.  There are two commentary tracks as well as the short film Camers on the main disc.  The second disc contains a couple of featurettes created by Mick Garris as promotional tools for Universal when the film was first released.  One of them contains a roundtable interview with Cronenberg as well as John Landis and John Carpenter (who was currently finalizing The Thing).  The interview was very entertaining although it was not truly Videodrome specific.  Mick’s second featurette was on the making of the film.  While this feature was more Videodrome specific, I didn’t find it nearly as interesting.  Part of this may have been because much of the footage in this featurette had also been featured in a featurette about the special effects and make up crew’s challenges on the film.  That featurette was created for Criterion and looks at Videodrome from the perspective of 2004.  The people they interviewed including Rick Baker no longer had to worry about spoiling key plot points or revealing trade secrets of the time, so it was much more informative,

The Criterion edition also includes three trailers and a slide show of  various marketing materials.  The French lobby card set looked really nice.  If you needed any further reason to pick up the Criterion edition, there is also a nearly 40 page booklet as well as a truly cool looking DVD case decked out to look like a video tape.

Videodrome is still an amazing movie, although it may not be what one would call escapist entertainment.  It challenges the mind and creates images that will remain in your mind long after the movie is over.  By all means, if you are a fan of the film, grab the Criterion edition which also contains the 89 minutes uncut version.  Videodrome gets 3 1/2 stars.

Seinfeld On DVD Exclusive Bonus DVD

I got hooked on Seinfeld by accident.  It was on before Quantum Leap for a while and I would watch it while waiting for Dr. Sam Beckett to make his next leap.  When they moved them around on the schedule, I continued watching Seinfeld.  I watched religiously during the time of the puffy shirt and the meta show about Jerry and George selling a show to NBC about “nothing”.  I drifted away during the later years, but came back to be disappointed by the series finale.  When the show came out on DVD, I wasn’t rushing to get it, but when it hit the pawn shop, I picked up the first 5 volumes.  Later on I picked up the remaining volumes.

So one day I was walking through Best Buy and I ran across a copy of a Seinfeld bonus DVD that they had offered as an exclusive when the first 2 boxsets came out.  They apparently had an overstock of them as they had them marked at $3.99.  I love DVDs, but one thing I love about DVDs are the exclusive bonuses that stores use to entice people to buy a particular DVD at their store.  I have happily collected several of these discs and the Best Buy Seinfeld On DVD Exclusive Bonus DVD was one I had to add to my collection.

Thursday night I had been run to Teays Valley to pick up some home improvement items at Home Depot.  Specifically we went there to get linoleum which the Southridge Home Depot doesn’t stock.  Unfortunately we failed to make sure that a roll of linoleum would fit inside of a Toyota Camry.  It wouldn’t.  So we picked up some of the other bathroom fixtures we needed and headed home.  When we got home, I was beat and it was late.  I remembered the Seinfeld DVD and popped it into the player.

The Bonus DVD is packaged in a CD style jewel case.  It features a trailer advertising the first 2 DVDs as well as the gift set.  The DVD also contains a featurette on “Life Before Seinfeld”.  This is not about the four major characters and what the actors that portray them did before Seinfeld.  It is a collection of interviews with some of the many featured players that have come on and had recurring roles or created popular characters.  This might have been interesting as well if there was any sense of narrative focus.  The featurette jumps around from actor to actor with only half of them or less really telling us anything about what they were doing before Seinfeld.  It would have also been helpful for the more casual Seinfeld fan if they had shown at least one clip of each of the actors in the role of their Seinfeld character.

The disc isn’t truly horrible, but it is poorly constructed.  On the Night Flight scale it might get a 3.