DVD Review: Kung Fu Panda

I’ve never been a huge fan of Dreamworks Animation’s features. While the first Shrek was, at the time, kind of funny the subsequent films have just been loose excuses to hang a bunch of too-cool for the room pop-culture references and off-color humor that just stops shy of being inappropriate for young audiences.

That’s why Kung Fu Panda is such a refreshing change and, honestly, might be one of the most enjoyable movies I’ve seen this year.

KFP is the story of Po, a panda who works with his father (a goose, a disconnect that’s hinted at just enough to be funny without being beaten into the ground) in a noodle shop in a small village. But in between slinging noodles Po dreams of being a kung fu master, idolizing the Furious Five, a group of kung fu prodigies who protect the village. Through a variety of circumstances, Po comes to be chosen as the warrior who will ultimately defeat a former student of master Shifu who turned to evil ways when he felt he was being overlooked.

The great thing about Kung Fu Panda is that it’s free of all the things that have cluttered the computer-animated features from just about everyone but Pixar. No characters break into Godfather lines, no one all of a starts laughing at a Star Wars joke. And, most surprisingly, there aren’t 78 crotch or poop jokes. Instead Po is good natured and well meaning and, while he’s not the most talented cat on the block, he never ridicules those who are more skilled than he is. He just keeps trying.

That’s why I’m so anxious to watch the movie with my kids. It’s completely appropriate for them, without any content that I would find objectionable or which I would worry about them emulating, resulting in my telling them to stop it. If there is it’s so miniscule I didn’t even notice it. That sort of situation has been in rare supply outside of overtly moralistic properties like Veggie Tales (which we love, just for the record). Everything is either completely, almost condescendingly pure or all about the fart jokes and telling people to shut up.

The DVD, available now, comes packed with extras that are geared toward kids, including activities and fun little featurettes that go behind the scenes of the movie and its characters. Some editions also come packaged with a bonus disc titled “Secrets of the Furious Five.” That short feature (about 22 minutes) goes behind the stories of the others that Po is training with. It’s animated in a more traditional style, one that’s very reminiscent of Japanese paintings and art. It’s quite enjoyable in and of itself, though obviously more so if you’ve seen the main movie. That disc has its own batch of bonus features that further expand on things.

I enjoyed Kung Fu Panda to a great extent. As I said, it ranks right up there with Iron Man as one of my favorite movies of the year and it’s highly recommended.

DVD Review: Mystery Science Theater – 20th Anniversary Edition

If you’re a fan of Mystery Science Theater you’re going to absolutely love this 20th Anniversary Edition box set. The set features four episodes of MST3K: First Spaceship on Venus, Laserblast, Werewolf and Future War. While these might not be the best of the best of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 vault they are definitely solid entries and perfectly representative of what the show was all about in its tenure on television.

It’s always good to go back through the old episodes of MST3K. Since I made the decision to ditch the vault of VHS tapes full of episodes taped off of Comedy Central and then Sci-Fi, my collection has (until now) been limited to Mitchell, Manos the Hands of Fate and MST3K: The Movie. And honestly it had been too long since I had pulled any of them out. So watching these four episodes was, not to sound too corny, pretty sweet and very much needed.

There are two things about this set, aside from the episodes themselves, that make it completely worth owning. First is the cover art for the individual discs. Tom Servo and Crow T. Robot get illustrated in a pulp comic style along with some characters from the movie. The images are absolutely fantastic, much better and much more unique than just the movie’s poster or something like that.

The second is the main extra that’s spread across the first three discs, titled “The History of MST3K.” It’s a series of interviews with just about everyone who had something to do with the creation of or glory of Mystery Science Theater, from Joel Hodgson to Mike Nelson to Mary Jo Pehl and everyone else you can think of. Some of the stories you’ll hear in those segments are repeated in the main bonus feature on the fourth disc, a video of the cast and crew’s 20th Anniversary Reunion Panel at this year’s Comic-Con. But even so some of that might be familiar, the banter between them and moderator Patton Oswalt makes it enjoyable in and of itself.

If you’ve got a Mistie (fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000) on your list of people needing Christmas presents, this set will make their day.

DVD Review: Hellboy II – The Golden Army

I wrote a full review of Hellboy II – The Golden Army over at SpoutBlog. It’s sort of half a review of the movie and half an examination of how Hellboy fits into the pantheon of stoic, emotionally stunted male action heroes.

The three-disc special edition I received to review contains a digital copy of the movie you can transfer to iTunes, possibly my favorite feature that’s being added to DVDs right now.

In Hellboy’s case, his laconic “Oh crap” is a massive sarcastic understatement when he’s faced with, as in one scene in The Golden Army, a massive flower god that’s spreading itself all over Manhattan. But while he works to betray little in the way of uncertainty in situations like that, the thing that’s causing him the most pain – his relationship with the human fire-starter Liz Sherman played by Selma Blair -  is always at the tip of his tongue. The fact that he can’t figure out her wants and needs continue to be the one problem in his life he can’t punch away, and that’s incredibly frustrating to him.

At the end of the first movie the narration intoned that embracing his love of Blair’s Sherman had fully made Hellboy a man. But he continues to act out in a decidedly immature way throughout the second movie. That changes, though, when he finds out that Sherman is pregnant with his child. That knowledge is, quite literally in the story, what gives him the will to live. Even though at that point he still acts first and thinks things through later, he does step up in the final showdown and embrace, if not his role as destroyer of worlds, certainly his role as the leader of the societal subset he and his cohorts inhabit.