'24: Season 2' as dumb as ever but it's very easy to get hooked
By Terry Lawson
Knight Ridder News Service
Being a sucker for real-time drama and as vulnerable as anyone else to hype, I tuned in for the first episode of "24" when it made its debut on 2001, but just as quickly tuned out.
The acting, the dramatics and the self-conscious use of split-screen and other gimmicks in Fox's drama about unstoppable secret government agent Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) and his efforts to outsmart the potential assassins of presidential candidate David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert) were so exaggerated I figured there was little point in coming back to see if the show improved; I figured it would be canceled by 1 or 2 p.m.
It wasn't, and when the "24: Season 2" — released as a six-DVD box set (20th Century Fox) — started last year, I gave it another look. I discovered it remained as over-hyped and over-the-top as I originally thought and that, for whatever reason, I no longer cared. The second season picked up with Palmer in the White House and newly widowed Jack trying to prevent the detonation of a devastating dirty bomb on American soil.
As the story line got more and more unbelievable and I got more and more hooked, I had to endure not only the absurd subplot with Jack's dumb daughter, but my wife's caustic commentary. Yet whenever I offered to watch the week's taped episode after she had gone to bed, she always offered to suffer through it — and then freaked when I forgot to tape one week.
Even she drew the line at watching the extended versions of some episodes on DVD (the 45 extra minutes are mostly devoted to character as opposed to plot, though there are a couple of tweaks of dramatic consequence).
Epic upgrades
It's hard to imagine that the same Walt Disney Co. that once refused to issue its classic catalog on videotape is the same one now selling its films twice again via DVD upgrades. But like everyone else, it has learned that those of us who love films like 1959's "Sleeping Beauty" will be inclined, even reluctantly, to upgrade if the sound and image are significantly improved, and if the supplemental material is as copious and watchable as it has been on the reissues of "Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs" and "Pinocchio."
Extras include a good making-of documentary, a 1959 "Disneyland" episode that not-so-subtly promotes the film, and a featurette about the songs with the once-anonymous voice of Briar Rose-Princess Aurora, Mary Costa. There is also an informative doc about the movie's distinctive animation design, which moved away from Maxfield Parrish and toward modernism, though I have to admit I think it's time the fawning-if-fact-filled Disneyphile Leonard Maltin was, how should we say this, given a rest. We also get a look at some of the live-action film that was used for "reference," and thus see how the dashing Prince Phillip became an unpaid model for his fictional counterpart.
More 'Confessions'
Miramax recently rereleased 2002's "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind" in New York and Los Angeles on the grounds that George Clooney's directing debut, an adaptation of game-show creator-and-host Chuck Barris' "memoir" about his secret life as a CIA assassin, was overlooked in last-year's year-end Oscar rush.
The brief rerelease's actual purpose, one suspects, was to serve as a trailer for the DVD release, a practice increasingly common as DVD sales and rentals become a bigger and bigger revenue source for the studios. Though the ads and packaging give equal billing to Clooney as the agent who allegedly recruits Barris and Julia Roberts, who appears briefly as a fetching femme fatale, the star of the film is Sam Rockwell, a fine and funny actor who nonetheless could have been the wrong guy to play the slick Barris.
Clooney, paired with his cinematographer Newton Sigel, provides some typically self-effacing commentary, and there's a smattering of outtakes that would have neither improved or substantially slowed a film that ran out of gas about halfway through.
