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From Music Video Distributors: “The Hardcore Collection: the Films of Richard Kern” – Includes Death Valley ’69, Right Side of my Brain, You Killed Me First, The Bitches, The Sewing Circle, Fingered, Submit to Me Now, My Nightmare, Horoscope, X Is Y, plus three flms never released on video, Manhattan Love Suicides (’85), Submit to Me (’86), and The Evil Cameraman (’86).

It’s the underground filmmaker’s most definitive collection, though it still only takes up one disc. The FIR screening group’s been enjoying them as shorts preceding whatever main feature is scheduled for the evening. Admittedly they probably wouldn’t serve to precede Shrek…so use caution, but for films of a more mature nature, these would get the energy level up. Most feature nudity, many feature violence, and there is a sense of pushing the envelope close to hard core without ever really diving into out and out pornography. Stories are thin, and often involve frustration and/or humiliation. Some of the actors are well known in New York’s underground/experimental circles, such as Lydia Lunch, Lung Leg, Henry Rollins, and Kern himself.

My copy had no liner notes, just a quote from Kern on the back cover of the disc jacket: “I’ve tried it all: crime thrills, drug thrills, sex thrills. Nowadays I get most of my thrills by offending people with my films. I don’t even have to be there. I can sit far away and think, ‘someone’s watching my video right now and thinking, Yeeughh!'”

It was another indicator of the vast range of DVD to see Kern’s work represented. Here’s hoping Kenneth Anger’s work makes its way to the new technology very soon.

From Dreamworks: Shrek double disc special edition – 2001, 1 hr. 33 mins, 5.1 Dolby Digital, 1.33: 1 & 1.78.1, several fun languages. Plus…more than I care to list, but some of the Xtras are a chance to record your voice over the characters in the film during 123 specific scenes, a behind the scenes featurette, Music Video’s, character interviews, filmmakers’s commentary, storyboard pitch for deleted scenes, technical goofs, and an extra scene tacked on after the titles featuring all the characters (including the King, pre-digestion) doing karoake numbers. Voice actors: Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, Cameron Diaz and John Lithgow. Directors: (the incredibly young)Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson.

Shrek is one of the year’s best films, bursting with iconoclastic good will, character warmth, extraordinary computer animation, and a great score. My few reservations were with the by-now desperately formulaic animal-buddy role (triumphantly played, occasionally, but not often enough, by Eddie Murphy), and a few of the dialogue scenes between Shrek and the Donkey, discussing philosophical metaphors like onions and such. I’ve seen it twice in the theater, and have given the DVD a once-over, and it isn’t falling off a jot. The pacing, hip gags, and art direction are rivetting. CGI’s ability to create sexy women – from a female ogre to a big red dragon, is wondrous to behold. Both Shrek and Fiona reminded me of people I knew, and they never looked better.

Dreamworks screened the film for the NBR with the directors in attendance, who, after fielding questions from the audience, presided over a voice over demonstration using such notables as Screening Committee Chairman Lois Ballon and Chief Lieutenant Bob Policastro. Both acquited themselves admirably in the film’s demanding voice roles – Lois as Fiona, and Bob as the Donkey. They definitely have fallback careers.

Co-director Adamson informed us that the Karaoke sequence at the end of the DVD was planned from the beginning to give home theater enthusiasts something they didn’t get theatrically. The number is brief, but has its share of warm and/or hilarious moments. Every one of those fairy tale characters is worth revisiting – watching Snow White disco-ing is so satisfying on some primal level – and a few of the characters even gain in dimension in this last little treat.

The infamous jabs at the Disney Kingdom, which one must assume were sanctioned by Jeffrey Katzenberg, are wryly mean-spirited, subtexturally beyond the ken of any children watching the show, and speak of the cruelty of the film business. Dreamworks really doesn’t have a much better reputation on that level; but how could it? Business is business. The product is what matters, except perhaps in extreme cases. And in this case, we’ve been given a gem. It drew applause when the directors confirmed rumors that there will indeed be a sequel.

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