'Roid Rage
Hulk Hogan rules! Rocky Balboa kicks ass! And Arnold Schwarzenegger can morph from a posey musclehead to a movie megastar and then governor of California. In America, bigger (and shinier and more ripped) is always better. Any wonder we’re a culture juiced up on steroids? Christopher Bell’s impressive documentary,
Bigger, Stronger, Faster* (on DVD September 30), takes
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Blue Man Coup
Is it possible to love a movie for just one costume? In the case of
Kabluey (on DVD next Tuesday), the answer is most definitely yes. Its story is familiar: It’s about a deadbeat protagonist in a quirky small town, the kind you see in, oh, 8 out of 10 indie films. But when this deadbeat takes a job passing out fliers while dressed as Kabluey, the mascot for a failing
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Rock of Ageless
You’d have to enjoy torturing kittens to dislike a documentary about spunky 80-somethings who sing in a choir, covering tunes by Sonic Youth and James Brown. But from the moment
Young @ Heart (on DVD September 16) begins — with 92-year-old granny Eileen crowing quizzically, “Darling, you’ve got to let me know / Should I stay or should I go?” — the film's subject proves more
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Got Milk?
Earlier this year, gay blogs were abuzz over the re-creation of 1970’s Castro Street for
Milk, Gus Van Sant ’s movie — due this November — in which
Sean Penn plays Harvey Milk, whose election to San Francisco Supervisor made him the first openly gay elected official of any large U.S. city. With all that Hollywood firepower about to burnish his memory (the film will also
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Gossip Guys
Spotted: Gay men everywhere getting a weekly dose of sex, backstabbing and bad behavior. . . thanks to a precocious set of high school kids. Since its premiere a year ago, The CW’s buzzed-about show
Gossip Girl — based on the series of books following the sordid lives of NYC prep-school teens — has had us putting away our
Mean Girls and
Cruel Intentions DVDs in favor of
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Smart Start
Life would’ve been a serious bummer had Maxwell Smart, a.k.a. Agent 86, not appeared on TV screens in 1965. As the project that put
Mel Brooks and
Buck Henry on the map,
Get Smart (season one comes out tomorrow on DVD) paved the way for some of the silliest comedies of the last 30 years:
Airplane,
The Naked Gun,
Scary Movie... Without it, Henry might not have sold his
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