Every science-fantasy film worthy of the name needs a wise mentor, preferably cloaked, who dispenses wisdom and looks pained when people don't believe him. In Star Wars, it was Alec Guinness. In The Fifth Element, Luc Besson's 1997 space romp, it's Ian Holm, playing a 23rd-century priest whose predecessors have passed along the secret to Earth's survival: Get stoned. No, sorry, get four stones.
Holm adopts the requisite pained expressions and brown cloak to tell the world that a huge ball heading toward Earth is pure evil but shouldn't be attacked. And does anyone listen? Not John Neville, who would make a pretty good mentor himself but here plays a general who insists on firing at the evil ball and gets himself killed in the opening minutes. He should have worn a cloak.
Besson ticks the other ingredients off as he goes. Action star? Bruce Willis. Action alien heroine? Milla Jovovich, wrapped in barely-there thermal bandages and sporting a stringy orange hairdo. Snarky villain? Gary Oldman, who had played an earlier over-the-top villain for Besson in 1994's The Professional (French title Léon). Here he sounds alarmingly like George Bush Sr. Annoying sidekick? Sign up Chris Tucker, whose voice -- a bit like South Park's Cartman on speed -- is even more irritating than in the same year's Money Talks. The good guys go off to another planet to grab those crucial stones before the bad guys can use them to kill humankind, but the plot is just an excuse to send a pumped-up taxi driver, a scantily clad alien saviour and a cloaked mentor off to fight a soul-patched evil genius. All you need, really.
The Fifth Element has been out on DVD a couple of times before, both times with excellent picture and sound, but this week's special edition adds a second disc of behind-the-scenes segments. It doesn't include the special-effects team's audio commentary that appears on Britain's version of the DVD, but by all accounts that's no great loss. Léon: The Professional is also out in a new special-edition DVD. Those enchanted by Natalie Portman in the recent indie film Garden State can watch her here as the little girl in jeopardy whose emergency guardian, Jean Reno, is a hit man.
M. Night Shyamalan's critical reputation has taken a slide since he wowed everyone with The Sixth Sense, but you wouldn't know it from the treatment he receives on this week's DVD for The Village. He dwells lovingly over every deleted scene: "The way I shot it, which was really aggressive, and turned out to be too aggressive, was I cut off her head during the shot." And, in a Shyamalan DVD tradition, he includes a mercifully brief home movie he shot as a kid, playing off Raiders of the Lost Ark. The Village has an impressive cast, including William Hurt, Sigourney Weaver, Joaquin Phoenix, Brendan Gleeson, Adrien Brody and new face Bryce Dallas Howard (Ron Howard's daughter), and, as usual, Shyamalan does his best to make the skin crawl with a creepy situation at first only vaguely understood.
Ice Station Zebra is John ( The Great Escape) Sturges's 1968 film based on Alistair MacLean's Cold War thriller. Rock Hudson, Patrick McGoohan and others aboard a U.S. nuclear sub are out to rescue a team at the North Pole, and you just know one of them isn't all he seems. Mel Gibson sought vicarious revenge on intrusive celebrity photographers by producing the ugly film Paparazzi (catchphrase: "It's time to even the score"), in which paparazzi Daniel Baldwin and Tom Sizemore are made so irredeemably cruel that Cole Hauser as a put-upon actor is allowed to get even, Death Wish style, with few consequences. Also out this week: King, a TV miniseries on Martin Luther King Jr., with Paul Winfield, Cicely Tyson and Ossie Davis; Bette Davis in The Letter; Ronald Colman losing his memory in Random Harvest; John Sayles's Silver City; Kyle MacLachlan as the ghost of Cary Grant offering romantic advice to a gay man in Touch of Pink; and two rousing films mentioned last week, King Solomon's Mines (with Stewart Granger) and Ivanhoe (with Robert Taylor).
Readers' nominations are still arriving for films that aren't yet on DVD but should be. More wish lists are welcome (maximum three titles, please) at , with "most-wanted DVDs" in the message field. I'll run them as space permits.
CLASSICS FOR KIDS
KIRIKOU AND
THE SORCERESS
For children open to the rhythm of folk tales, the 1998 animated feature Kirikou and the Sorceress will thrill them in ways a lot of more Disney-fied animated stories can't. Though French director Michel Ocelot's tale is knitted together from traditional stories of West Africa, where it is set, the spirit is familiar from the Grimm fairy tales and the yarns about Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox.
Kirikou, a curious, headstrong, impossibly speedy and almost invisibly tiny boy, insists on being born at a time of his choosing and immediately asks a few tough questions. For instance, why is the sorceress Karaba so wicked that she has gobbled up all the men of the village and caused the local spring to run dry? He spends the film working to outwit her and travels to consult the Wise Man of the Mountain. The film, a French-language (with optional English track) co-production of France, Belgium and Luxembourg, is inventive, funny, wise and beautifully animated. Senegalese pop star Youssou N'Dour wrote (but doesn't sing) the songs and score.
Parental advisory: The little boy is naked throughout and the women of the village wear nothing above the waist. Since Kirikou is not above prophesying death or having her machine-like minions burn down a house when she is thwarted, occasional elements may be too scary for the younger kids. The DVD is available by itself or in a set with another Ocelot film, Princes and Princesses, animated in silhouette.
EXTRA! EXTRA!
BROADWAY: THE
AMERICAN MUSICAL
Care to give your regards to Broadway? The six-part PBS series Broadway: The American Musical is out on a three-disc DVD, tracking the stage musical from 1893 to 2004. Some clips fly by so quickly they induce show-stopper interruptus, but it's hard to beat the range and rarity of the material and the quality of the glimpsed performances.
The real treat is in the extras: another three hours of extended interviews and uncut performances, including Stephen Sondheim playing his song Someone in a Tree (from Pacific Overtures) while four members of the original cast stand around the piano and sing. The late Jerry Orbach talks of starring with Chita Rivera in Chicago. On opening night, she was petrified. "Chita, I said, this isn't real life. She said, what do you mean? I said, we're not robbing a bank. If we screw this up they're not going to throw us in jail. How bad can it be?"