Movies: DVD Reviews

Under definition of a biopic, you'll find 'Ray'

'Ray'
(Universal, $29.98)
(movie)
(DVD format and extras)

"Ray" is an exceptionally average movie. It finds the center line down the middle of every road if comes upon — script, direction, cinematography — and stays there relentlessly. It's as if director Taylor Hackford wanted to celebrate the life of Ray Charles by giving him the most biopic-ish biopic that he could create.

Let's do a checklist: Triumph over adversity? There are plenty: poverty, blindness, racism, annoying bandleaders, drug addiction. Evidence that he was a man and not just a myth? See above (and add compulsive womanizing). Flashback? Hello, long-suffering mother. Early childhood trauma? Dude has plenty, including the drowning death of his brother, referenced in hallucinations. Montages? Oh, man.

At two and a half hours of clipped scenes and "then this happened" flow, Ray is both bloated and oddly shallow. Jamie Foxx's performance as the titular songwriter — whose discovery that R&B + gospel = Soul revolutionized American music — is a wonderful feat of mimicry. (Curtis Armstrong as Atlantic Records head Ahmet Ertegun and Richard Schiff as Jerry Wexler would be fun in "The Atlantic Records Story").

But the movie is devoid of subtlety, a quality closely associated with Charles. In spite of some lovely period production design, Hackford can't shake a distinct Movie of the Week vibe: "Ray" will cut great when it's shown on network TV as oh, probably a two-night "special event."

Extras are plentiful, but pro forma: Commentary from Hackford, deleted scenes, a few cheap-feeling talking heads docs on the man, the movie and the myth, with too little of any of them. -- Joe Gross

'Power, Passion & Glory: The Real Story of Texas Football Madness'
($29.95 Game Partners/Ken Heckmann Productions)
(Movie)
(DVD format and extras)

This is the real "Friday Night Lights." Ken Heckmann's meticulous — and meticulously fair — documentary about small-town Texas high-school football verifies all the dramatic details of the popular and slightly fictionalized studio movie. For "Power, Passion & Glory," set in the North Texas burg of Celina, Heckmann coasts on fairly static camerawork and hackneyed narration by sports announcer Pat Summerall.

Yet his story wallops without any Hollywood effects. Heckmann follows the Celina Bobcats for a season, just after they had won 57 straight games and four consecutive 2A state championships. As his documentary starts, the Bobcats have moved up to the tougher 3A level and have just lost their legendary couch, G.A. Moore, to archrival Pilot Point.

The new coach, Butch Ford, the former defensive coordinator — yes, these high-school teams in towns of fewer than 2,500 people come with big staffs — anchors the film. Thick-waisted, thick-accented, Ford lives and breathes football, speaking in sports minutiae and motivational truisms. He clearly has earned the trust of his players, Moore (a kindly father figure) and the townsfolk, who, almost to one, obsess about the Bobcats' fate.

Everything that might have seemed strange and exaggerated to an outsider in "Friday Night Lights" is justified in "Power, Passion & Glory." The extras include expendable scenes and inexplicable duplications of retained material, but also powerful interviews with the football faithful, including a former player confined by a sports field injury to a wheelchair, anxious for his two sons who both chose to play the game.
— Michael Barnes

'Curb Your Enthusiasm: The Complete Third Season'
(Warner Home Video, $39.98)
(TV show)
(DVD format and extras)

The sweet-tart pleasures of "Seinfeld" co-creator Larry David's HBO sitcom "Curb Your Enthusiasm" reach their zenith with the release of its third season on DVD.

Larry, who plays an even more curmudgeonly version of himself on the improvised-from-an-outline show, hits all-time depths of bad behavior here. He helps secretly drug a dessert ("The Benadryl Brownie") to get a Christian Scientist's facial swelling down so she can attend the Emmy Awards with his buddy Richard Lewis. Larry inadvertently gets a 7-year-old drunk on wine while trying to persuade the girl to give up her dog and let her allergic dad (the growling, brilliant Jeff Garlin) move back home. And, in perhaps the funniest moment of the season, Larry reasons with his wife that maybe they shouldn't both be in town together during what they believe will be an impending terrorist attack on Los Angeles. (She has to stay for a charity event. Larry reasons, awkwardly, that it would be a shame that they should both have to die when he could be playing golf at Pebble Beach.)

Like George Costanza's shenanigans on "Seinfeld," Larry's antics have to be seen to be appreciated. The third season, which aired the year after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, nailed the nation's free-floating anxiety and coupled it with David's uncanny sense of comedy amid chaos. It was a high point that wasn't carried through to the show's fourth season, which featured a Broadway gig for Larry that didn't return the laughs to which fans had become accustomed from "Curb." Extras, as with the other seasons on disc, are minimal, but a U.S. Comedy Arts Festival "Stop and chat" session is illuminating — Garlin, David, directors Robert B. Weide and Larry Charles, and cast member Susie Essman share their favorite scenes from the show and talk about how such rich comedy comes together from David's detailed outlines and his cast's spot-on improv.
— Omar L. Gallaga