Doctor Who - The Keeper of Traken
by Chris Hughes

1981 was a transitional year for the long running British Science Fiction/Fantasy program Doctor Who. Tom Baker, arguably the series' most popular Doctor, was leaving the series, and producer John Nathan-Turner was finally being given an opportunity to remake the show to his own designs. The Keeper of Traken was the next to last Tom Baker adventure and fans were understandably uneasy about the future of the program. If it hadn't been for significant creative differences with Nathan-Turner, Baker might have stayed with the program for a few more seasons, but it wasn't to be so.

Read More >>

Doctor Who - Logopolis
by Chris Hughes

Logopolis, Tom Baker’s final adventure as the Doctor, marked a major turning point for the series. After seven seasons playing the Doctor, Baker wasn’t just the most popular actor to play the roll; he was the only Doctor for an entire generation of young fans. Baker had been unhappy with the show ever since John Nathan-Turner had become producer. Nathan-Turner wanted to take the show in a new direction, and along the way eliminated the Doctor’s robotic dog K-9, revamped Baker’s costume, had the theme rewritten, changed the tone of the incidental music and began to include more pop culture references in the dialogue. All that was left to complete the transformation was to remove curmudgeonly Baker and replace him with a fresh face.

Read More >>

Doctor Who - Castrovalva
by Chris Hughes

Though Peter Davison made his debut as the Doctor in Castrovalva, the adventure was actually the fourth one filmed in 1981. Picking up exactly where the previous year’s Logopolis left off, the Doctor’s companions Nyssa (Sarah Sutton), Tegan (Janette Fielding) and Adric (Mathew Waterhouse) pick up the unconscious Time Lord and return him to the TARDIS after narrowly evading police capture. Once inside, the Doctor, clearly disoriented and suffering from the ill effects of a rough regeneration, disappears into the endless corridors of the TARDIS. Adric follows the Doctor, leaving Nyssa and Tegan in the control room where they discover that the TARDIS has mysteriously been set on a course for the heart of the Big Bang where they’ll all be burned to a crisp. While all this is going on we learn that Adric is under the Master’s control, that the Doctor needs to find something called the Zero Room and that something has gone wrong with his regeneration.

Read More >>

Doctor Who - The Web Planet
by Chris Hughes

One of the earliest existing complete Doctor Who adventures, The Web Planet is a masterpiece of surreal design that fans have been eagerly awaiting on DVD. In many ways, this adventure set the stage for much of what would come later in the series. It features exceedingly imaginative set designs, bizarre costumes, memorable performances, and a plot that focuses more on the aliens than on the Doctor and his companions. The Web Planet’s slow and deliberate pace draws viewers in and envelops them in an interior logic and atmosphere that reminds me of the feel of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. But most of all, it’s a psychedelic artifact of switched-on ‘60s’ culture that works as both a crazy lark and a relatively serious science fantasy story.

Read More >>

Doctor Who - The Complete Second Series
by Chris Hughes

I think it’s fair to say that American fans of Doctor Who, if not fans generally, were skeptical when the BBC announced it would be reviving the series after a sixteen-year hiatus. At the time of its cancellation, the original Doctor Who had been on air for twenty-six years and had gotten a little long in the tooth. The classic Tom Baker period was a distant memory and many people felt that the show had run its course. In the intervening decade and a half, several attempts to bring the show back had failed miserably, leaving devotees of the time-traveling curmudgeon with only fan fiction, radio dramas and home video to get their fix.

Read More >>

Factory Girl – Unrated Edition
by Chris Hughes

It’s kind of creepy how much Sienna Miller looks like Edie Sedgwick, the subject of director George Hickenlooper’s 2006 bio flick Factory Girl. It’s in the eyes and the smile, a kind of homespun innocence peeking through a veneer of confidence and power. The resemblance is uncanny, and if visual affinity were the soul criterion used to judge this kind of film, Factory Girl would have been a huge success.

Read More >>

Hollywoodland
by Chris Hughes

The first thing you have to ask yourself about Hollywoodland is who is this film’s target audience? A semi-fictionalized account of the adult life of 1950s era actor George Reeves, known as Superman to the baby boom generation, it takes as its subject a person who isn’t particularly popular with contemporary audiences and whose mythos has diminished rather than grown over the years. Are there really enough George Reeves fans out there to support this kind of film? Alternately, is the film engaging and revealing enough to get past its rather dull subject matter and bring in viewers based on its entertainment value alone? Looking at Hollywoodland’s tepid box office receipts, I’d say that the answer to both of those questions is ‘no.’ 

Read More >>

Marie Antoinette
by Chris Hughes

Marie Antoinette opens with a song by Gang of Four, one of the ‘80s most influential bands. They lyric goes:

The problem of leisure
What to do for pleasure
I do love a new purchase
A market of the senses

We all learned the story of Antoinette in school and the comparison between her life of excess and the words of the song is obvious. But Sofia Coppola is far too accomplished an artist to offer an audience such a surface reading of her subject. One clue can be found later in the song, which culminates in this line:

Read More >>

Master and Commander – The Far Side of the World
by Chris Hughes

To be honest, I wasn’t expecting much from Master and Commander - The Far Side of the World. I’m not particularly keen on Russell Crow, an actor whose range often spans the entire gamut from A to B, and though I’ve read my fair share of sea stories, mostly Melville and Forester, I’ve never delved into the wildly popular Patrick O’Brien books upon which this film is based. It was with some surprise then that I found myself really enjoying this film on a number of levels.

Read More >>

Mothra Vs Godzilla
by Chris Hughes

The release of Toho Studio’s original Japanese version of the first Godzilla film was one of DIMP’s picks for Best DVDs of 2006. In our capsule review, we said that Godzilla is “a cultural artifact and a work of art that holds its own against some of the greatest genre films ever made.” But Godzilla was just the beginning of a franchise that would result in the production of twenty-four films starring the gargantuan reptile. The quality of the sequels is inconsistent to say the least, but the fourth film, 1964’s Mothra vs Godzilla, stands well above the others.

Read More >>

The Net: The Unabomber, LSD and the Internet (2004)
by Chris Hughes

At first blush, the idea of signing up as a reviewer for a popular DVD Web site is exciting. You get to write about movies! You get some free screener DVDs! What a great way to share your unique viewpoint and build your collection at the same time. But there comes a moment in any reviewer’s career when the shine comes off the apple. Mine came the day The Net: The Unabomber, LSD and the Internet arrived in my mailbox.

Read More >>

The Prisoner - Complete Megaset (40th Anniversary)
by Chris Hughes

From its outset, television has been looked down upon as a populist form with little inherent artistic value. Maligned as the “boob tube” and “idiot box,” the small screen has produced more than its share of genuinely worthless content. But television programming is a volume game and amidst the vast amount of effluvia, from time to time a genuine work of art emerges. The Prisoner is one of the earliest and best examples of a program that realizes television's potential as a legitimate platform for pure creative expression.

Read More >>

RAN - The Criterion Collection
by Chris Hughes

In the pantheon of Akira Kurosawa's work there are certain films of unassailable quality. Among them are The Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, Rashomon and RAN. Of all of Kurosawa's classics, RAN is by far the most staged, stylized and surreal. The plot is a reasonably straightforward adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear in which an aging regent splits his kingdom between his three sons, sons who proceed to wage war upon one another for control of the whole family estate.

Read More >>

Simon Schama's The Power of Art
by Chris Hughes

From time to time, I hear people say “I don’t like art”—a statement that strikes me as almost completely meaningless. It’s like saying, “I don’t like food” or “I don’t like sounds.” There’s so much variety among artists and media that there’s no way to talk about it as a cohesive whole; dismissing all of it in one fell swoop is absurd. But something obviously drives people to conclude that art is inaccessible to them. Aesthetics are perceived as the domain of academics, appreciation of the great masterpieces only attainable through elitist interpretation. Pejoratives like “artsy fartsy” are used to dismiss painting, architecture and sculpture that seems concerned more with beauty and abstraction than with functional or utilitarian application. In short, to many people, art is detached from the pressing reality of everyday life, unworthy of their time or attention.

Read More >>

TV Party the Documentary
by Chris Hughes

In 1978, then High Times columnist Glenn O'Brien was interviewed for a New York cable access program that he thought no one would ever see. Cable access was a tiny, government-mandated backwater in the emerging cable television industry of the late ‘70s and O'Brien had no reason to believe that anyone was watching. But on the bus the next morning, one of the passengers recognized Glenn from the show and a light went on in O'Brien's head.

Read More >>

30 Rock- The Complete First Season
by Chris Hughes

I don’t think anyone is exactly sure what possessed NBC to launch two behind-the-scenes at “SNL” comedies in the same season but that’s exactly what they did with Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and 30 Rock.

Of the two, Aaron Sorkin’s Studio 60 seemed to be the surefire hit. Starring Mathew Perry, written and created by the West Wing guy, enjoying a massive budget and featuring an endless stream of high profile guest stars… what could go wrong? Meanwhile, unassuming 30 Rock was almost overlooked by NBC, bouncing around from time slot to time slot and enjoying minimal promotion on the network.

Read More >>

Velvet Redux: Live MCMXCIII
by Chris Hughes

From the moment the band formed in the mid 1960s, The Velvet Underground was the very embodiment of dichotomy. At once a commercial disaster and an artistic triumph, musically accomplished but sweetly naive, defiant of convention yet skilled at leveraging the language of pop to craft unforgettable tunes, VU was simultaneously on the outside looking in and on the inside looking out. The tensions created by these wildly varying aspects of their music and personalities gave rise to the genius we remember them for today.

Read More >>

Voices In Wartime
by Chris Hughes

I'll admit it. To paraphrase Pete Townshend, I've known no war. In that respect I'm like most Americans my age. I grew up in a time of peace, when wars were distant events that had no direct impact on my life. But more than that - even now, when this nation is involved in a continuing conflict in Iraq, I still know no war. That's because I, like every civilian, can never fully comprehend the experience of wartime. How can anyone who has never been trained to kill, has never faced the institutionalized struggle for life and death, ever really understand it?

Read More >>