'Kinsey' DVD enhanced by great extras

By Terry Lawson
Knight Ridder News Service

Laura Linney plays Mac and Liam Neeson plays Alfred Kinsey in a movie portraying the life of the sexual behavior scientist and how his research and books changed attitudes on sex in the 1950s. Fox Searchlight

"Sean Penn" (voiced by Matt Stone) in "Team America: World Police," an excursion into gross behavior. Paramount Pictures

Now, however, it's getting an impressive second launch in a two-DVD Special Edition (4 stars, Fox; there is also a single-disc movie-only version) that proves that its supporters were correct: This is a terrifically entertaining, impeccably revealing and important account of the life and career of a scientist and educator who made the world a better place.

Writer-director Bill Condon's film tracks the life of sex researcher Alfred Kinsey (played by Liam Neeson) from his repressed childhood as the son of a minister (John Lithgow) to his tenure at Indiana University, where he abandoned insect research to explore the secret lives of humans, through the controversy and excitement evoked by his first book, "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male," in 1948 and its female counterpart, published in 1953.

But the movie does not afford him sainthood. It acknowledges the stresses and strains on his private life and marriage to the enlightened partner everyone called Mac (Laura Linney) and the effect his work had on his relationships with his researchers, two of whom are played by Timothy Hutton and Peter Sarsgaard.

The film reminds a generation now benefiting from sexual freedom — and struggling with the cynical and cheapening commercialization of sex — that there was a long, dark period of ignorance, lies and fear that his work brought to a close.

Since discounting means there will be only a few dollars difference between the movie-only version and the Special Edition, anyone intrigued by the film will be happy they shelled out the extra cash. Along with an 85-minute documentary that contrasts the real Kinsey with the film version, it also includes no fewer than 20 deleted scenes, most of which are as good as anything in the released film, affording us further insight into the characters, especially Mrs. Kinsey.

These can be watched with or without commentary by Condon (who provides a thoughtful and thorough scene-by-scene analysis on Disc 1), but it really makes you wish Fox, which pioneered the DVD branching concept that allowed the viewer to reinsert cut scenes where they would have originally been placed, only to abandon in it recent years, would re-institute it. This is one of those rare instances where more would have been better.

'Team America'

I'm not really sure the same can be said for the new "Uncensored and Unrated Special Collectors' Edition" of the war-on-terror satire "Team America: World Police" (3 stars, Paramount) — another film that had trouble finding an audience, but for entirely different reasons. It would seem that anyone who wanted to see the war satirized didn't want to see it done by the gleefully vulgar creators of "South Park," and they certainly didn't want it executed entirely by marionettes.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone directed and wrote the movie, which assembles a fun- and gun-loving "A-Team" to prevent a nuclear weapon from being delivered to Arab terrorists by North Korea's Kim Jong Il.

As the filmmakers must have anticipated, the Motion Picture Association's ratings board was uneasy about awarding an R-rating to a movie whose inspirational theme song was built around the F-word, and whose characters, when not accidentally blowing up the Eiffel Tower, had sex so graphic that Kinsey might have been embarrassed. Inevitably, cuts were made, and "Team America" got its R.

The only obvious difference between the DVD version and the theatrical cut is that the hot puppet sex goes into bathroom territory, which is grosser but no funnier. Everything else is just as gross and hilarious in the same juvenile way as "South Park." A second viewing of the film makes it pretty obvious that it took extensive computer effects to make the puppets do what they do.

'Hoop Dreams'

Space issues led to last week's column not including a review of the Criterion Collection's release of "Hoop Dreams" (4 stars). It has been on the shelves for a week now, but it's worth noting.

This revelatory 1994 documentary followed the fortunes of two gifted high school basketball players for six years, chronicling their attempts to follow the example of former Detroit Piston Isiah Thomas by making the most of scholarships at the same legendary basketball school he attended.

Not only is this easily the best sports-related documentary to date (followed by "When We Were Kings"), it may be the best sports movie ever made. The fact that "Hoop Dreams" failed to even be nominated for a best documentary Oscar now seems almost criminal.

Though the extras are skimpy by Criterion standards, if you've never seen it, or not seen it since it was originally released, you will not be disappointed.

'Flaming Lips'

The long list of other DVD releases worth noting this week is headed by a couple of musical curiosities: "The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle" (3 stars, Sony) offers the first opportunity for many Yanks to see the fabled Sex Pistols movie, made without a disgusted Johnny Rotten's participation. It's awful in the most compelling, car-wreck kind of way.

"The Flaming Lips: The Fabulous Freaks" (3 stars, Sony) is as sincere as "Swindle" is phony, a funny account of how a bunch of Oklahoma oddballs evolved into one of the best pop bands in the United States without denouncing their essential weirdness.