DVD: Futurama Holiday Spectacular (and Other Classic Christmas Home Viewing)

One of the most welcome resurrections in recent TV history has been the Futurama revival on Comedy Central, and if you missed the show’s brilliant comeback, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment is stuffing your stocking with Futurama: Volume 5 just in time for the holidays. That timing is key, not only because the set makes a great gift for the animation/comedy/Groening fan in your life, but also because it features the three-part “Futurama Holiday Spectacular,” in which the gang learns the true meaning of Xmas, Robanukah, and Kwanzaa. All of which got me to thinking about some other favorite sitcom viewing worth checking out at home this holiday weekend…

The Mary Tyler Moore Show: “Not a Christmas Story” (1974)
This classic show had several great Christmas-themed episodes, but my favorite involves a freak snowstorm trapping everyone at the station at the exact moment where no one is speaking to each other. “Happy Homemaker” Sue Ann Nivens tries to remedy the situation by making everyone eat her “Christmas in Many Lands” dinner, which doesn’t go all that well.

The Jack Benny Program: “Christmas Shopping” (1958)
While Seinfeld later got raves for staging an episode entirely within the confines of a Chinese restaurant, that sort of thing was common in TV’s early years. Here, the infamously cheap Jack spends the whole show in a department store picking out Christmas gifts, and literally driving a harried clerk (the great Mel Blanc) to suicide.

Family Ties: “A Keaton Christmas Carol” (1983)
Who better to fill the shoes of the greedy Ebenezer Scrooge than Reagan-era Young Turk Alex P. Keaton (Michael J. Fox)?

South Park: “Mr. Hankey the Christmas Poo” (1997)
South Park has made the holiday episode part of its stock in trade over the years, but this Season One entry about a singing piece of excrement who brings the holiday spirit to town let viewers know early that no taboo was going to be off-limits for this show. (This one’s about as un-Rankin-Bass as you can get.)

30 Rock: “Ludachristmas” (2007)
This one’s a winner for the title alone, but it also features the meeting of the terrifying Colleen Donaghy (Elaine Stritch) and Liz’s parents Dick (Buck Henry) and Margaret Lemon (Anita Gillette), as well as Henry uttering the immortal line, “It’s not a Lemon party without old Dick!” Alas, only Hulu Plus members can watch this entire show online, but here’s this year’s hilarious holiday episode, “Christmas Attack Zone”:

Share your own favorites in the comments section — and Happy Holidays!

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On DVD: Big Bad Mama and 5 Other Movies That Introduced Gen-Xers to Sex

From sneaking a peek at naughty postcards from behind the barn to entering “hot three-ways” into Google, youngsters always manage to summon forth the forbidden pleasures of adolescence by gaping at forbidden images of human sexuality. Somewhere between the Depression and the Internet generation, there was HBO, providing a steady stream of soft-core salaciousness (before they pushed that sort of thing onto their less-reputable cousin, Cinemax). One film that impacted me during my tween years was Big Bad Mama (out this week from Shout! Factory as part of its series of Roger Corman classics) — not only was there fairly explicit (albeit non-graphic) humping, but it was being performed by recognizable TV stars Angie Dickinson and William Shatner!

Here are some other sexy faves that will be fondly remembered by people who were already in their mid-20s by the time AOL came around:

Pretty Maids All in a Row: Angie Dickinson strikes again, alongside Rock Hudson as a high school coach who’s catnip to all the cheerleaders. This Roger Vadim comedy-mystery wasn’t a big hit in theaters, but its ubiquity on cable TV in the late ’70s and early ’80s earned it enough of a cult following from Reagan-era adolescents that Warner Archive recently released it on DVD.

The Sensuous Nurse: Ursula Andress plays the titular (in more ways than one) angel of mercy, hired by a scheming family in the hopes that her va-va-voomery will kill off the ailing patriarch so his heirs can collect his fortune. But Andress has more in her bag of tricks than a stethoscope and a G-string.

Porky’s: This bawdy Canadian teen comedy about horny high-schoolers in the “innocent” 1950s was a box-office smash, spawning a rash of way sleazier copycats and ripoffs. But this one does feature a few iconic sequences, from the shower-peeping-gone-wrong to Kim Cattrall’s lustily canine approach to sex. Interesting sidenote: This film’s success allowed director Bob Clark to have carte blanche on A Christmas Story, which came out the following year.

Private Lessons: This story about a high-school nerd who gets schooled in the ways of love by cougar sexpot Sylvia Kristel (best known as the star of the original Emmanuelle movies) pushed a lot of teen-boy buttons, even though it goes to some weird and unpleasant places. The all-Rod Stewart soundtrack underlines the fact that pretty much every hit the British rocker ever had was about boning.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High: While director Amy Heckerling wisely got the audience’s attention with the famous shot of Phoebe Cates emerging from a pool and popping her top, she pulls a brilliant switcheroo by also including two of the cinema’s most dispiriting sex scenes: First, Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character loses her virginity to a skeevy stereo salesman in a grimy baseball dugout, then she has an unfulfilling encounter with a premature ejaculator. (That latter coupling leads to an abortion, no less.)

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Kristen Stewart, Emma Watson And Three Other Actors Who Could Replace Emma Stone In 21 Jump Street

Emma Stone recently announced that due to her involvement as a web-slinger’s love interest in the forthcoming Spiderman she would be unable to join the cast of Jonah Hill’s 21 Jump Street remake. Now, it’s hard to be sure if the red-headed upstart is really jumping ship to play Peter Parker’s non-red-headed gal or if she just happened to catch The A-Team OnDemand, but here are five other actors that would make the perfect Officer Judy Hoffs. It’s time to go back to school kids.

Kristen Stewart: This is a girl who would make a great undercover high school student any day of the week. She fidgets, she has ticks, her facial expressions are at times baffling and she never stops playing with her hair. Added bonus, this little lady proved she could handle a motorcycle in that independent vampire series.

Emma Watson: Unlike every other actor her age this girl actually went to school, in fact she is still in school. That Brown University education will have her acing every exam while still managing to pull down the bad guys Hermione Granger style.

Kristin Chenoweth: If anything, this singing siren may have to stretch to look old enough to play a high school student. She did prove in Glee however that she can hang with the bad boys and handle her liquor so who better to help clean up some out of control teens?

Holly Robinson Peete: This woman has yet to age so why not have her reprise the role. Since her Jump Street days she hasn’t done much other than hang with Mr. Cooper and Mr. Trump, so a comeback is definitely in the cards. Unless…

Johnny Depp: Remake role reversal. Show us what you got Johnny.

[ MTV Movies Blog ]

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Metropolis and 5 Other Silent Films That Don't Feel Like Homework

Fritz Lang’s sci-fi masterpiece gets a snappy new DVD release with The Complete Metropolis (new from Kino International this week), including long-lost footage that recently surfaced thanks to a 16mm print found in an Argentine vault. Sadly, the fact that it’s a silent movie will cause lots of otherwise-adventurous moviewatchers to turn up their nose at it, like it was a spoonful of cod-liver oil being administered by Kate Gosselin. But even if repeated film-class screenings of Intolerance made you think that all pre-sound movies were tedious and overacted, a look at Metropolis — or any of the following films — should convince you otherwise.

1.) Sunrise: After more than 80 years, F.W. Murnau’s haunting romance about a cheating husband, his underappreciated wife, and his slutty mistress remains one of the screen’s most beautiful (in both the visual and emotional sense) love stories ever put on the screen. From the film’s clever use of its intertitles — when the mistress wonders if the wife could be “drowned,” the word sinks slowly off-screen — to its breathtaking and revolutionary use of the camera, Sunrise still gets you where it counts.

2.) The Navigator: Film scholars get all gooey over Buster Keaton’s The General, but my favorite from this early comedy genius is this tale of two clueless rich kids who find themselves all alone at sea, and are forced to learn how to cook, sail, and generally fend for themselves. Keaton’s agility for physical and visual humor makes words completely extraneous, and the same could be said for…

3.) The Gold Rush: … Charlie Chaplin, who basically helped to invent the movies as we know them, even though his films still feel fresh and electric today. He’s got plenty of great silent features to choose from — City Lights, Modern Times, The Kid — but this one’s perfect for beginners, as it showcases his deft skill at balancing mammoth sight gags with intimate moments of sentimentality.

The Navigator

Gold Rush

4.) Safety Last: The other great comic of the silent era was Harold Lloyd, forever immortalized as the guy hanging off the clock (which he does in this movie). But while his breathtakingly foolhardy and hilarious stunt work is Lloyd’s main claim to fame, he was the screen’s original nerd, a bespectacled and underestimated little guy who managed to accomplish some extraordinary feat by the end of the movie.

5.) Greed: While MGM slashed the running time of Erich von Stroheim’s masterpiece, even the butchered version still stands as one of the greatest American movies. A winning lottery tickets spells disaster for the woman who holds it and the two men who love her in this uncompromisingly hard-hitting drama. You can trace a direct line between what von Stroheim accomplished here and, say, Paul Thomas Anderson’s evisceration of American avarice in There Will Be Blood.

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Conan O'Brien Won't Allow Jay Leno on His New Show and 6 Other Stories You'll Be Talking About Today

Also in today’s edition of The Broadsheet: James Bond will return… Spider-Man close to finding its Aunt May and Uncle Ben… David O. Russell continues to make weird career choices… and more ahead.

· Here’s a total surprise: Conan O’Brien said he would never allow Jay Leno to appear on his new talk show! Well, almost never. “He can come as the musical guest, because that I want to see; no one knows he has an operatic range,” O’Brien said in an interview with Playboy before adding, “No, there are certain things I will not do, regardless of the price.” Too bad. If only Leno had another way to appear on television. [Reuters]

· James Bond will return! Maybe. According to MGM’s bankruptcy papers, the studio is planning on releasing a new Bond movie in November of 2012, with subsequent sequels following every other year. The best laid plans of mice and men… [Bloomberg]

· When we last checked in on The Hunger Games — better known to you as “The Next Twilight — Gary Ross had moved in front of contenders like Frances Lawrence and Sam Mendes on the list of directors. Now it appears Ross is the list. The Seabiscuit helmer was at AFM with Lionsgate to talk up the film adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ bestseller. [Variety]

· The Spider-Man reboot might get even more classy. Martin Sheen and Sally Field are in talks to portray Uncle Ben and Aunt May in Marc Webb’s new film. In case you’re wondering who to add in your movie star fantasy league, Sheen is further along in the talks than Field. [THR/Heat Vision, THR/Heat Vision]

· Speaking of Spider-Man: Julie Taymor’s musical has been delayed yet again and won’t reach the Broadway stage until January at the earliest. [NYT/ArtsBeat]

· Make their day, etc. David O. Russell and Ice Cube are reportedly teaming up for a Dirty Harry-like possible franchise at New Line. For Russell, this comes on the heels of Old St. Louis and video game adaptation Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, which is a crazy grouping of films, but at least shows that the talented director is actually working again. [Deadline]

· If you’ve been watching the Pirates of the Caribbean series and thought to yourself, “Needs more Judi Dench,” then get excited. The Great Dame will reportedly film a cameo in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. File this under, “Thanks for nothing, Internet.” [Daily Mail]

Tagged: conan, conan o'brien, gary ross, jay leno, johnny depp, judi dench, julie taymor, marc webb, martin sheen, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, sally field, spider-man, the hunger games, the tonight show

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