This week's platinum picks are an eclectic bunch: Sweeney Todd, the third Bette Davis Collection and Jimmy Carter: Man From Plains. But you also might want to check out Picture Snatcher, an early '30s vehicle driven by James Cagney. And Mike Douglas (with Bob Hope and a tiny Tiger Woods) has its moments.
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
* * * (out of four), 2007, DreamWorks, R, $30 and $35 editions
Johnny Depp sings Stephen Sondheim and even sounds (as others have noted) a little like David Bowie. Not bad, considering you also get Oscar-winning art direction.
Back story: No, not bad and definitely easy to admire but also rather joyless in ways that go beyond its downer premise. (London barber Depp slits throats of subsequent corpses, which colleague Helena Bonham Carter then turns into pie fillings.) Successful enough, though, adding more ammo to the Depp-Tim Burton canon.
Extras, extras: Both discs have a production featurette. A few on the pricier set include debates over whether Todd existed; the blood prosthetics; and a news conference where Burton and cast show raucous senses of humor.
The Bette Davis Collection, Vol. 3
* * *, 1939-46, Warner, unrated, $60
When you get into Vol. 3 of almost anything, bones have been picked. But this box isn't short on entertainment.
Back story: You get All This, and Heaven Too (1940, best-picture Oscar nominee; Bette as a governess); The Great Lie (1941, amazingly messy pregnancy saga; Mary Astor took a supporting Oscar); In This Our Life (1942, family turmoil; Olivia de Havilland co-stars; John Huston's second film as director); and Watch on the Rhine (1943, Lillian Hellman's anti-Nazi play; co-star Paul Lukas won an Oscar). My favorites: The Old Maid (1939, Civil War, more complicated pregnancy; Davis and co-star Miriam Hopkins famously fought on the set); and Deception (1946, stolen by Claude Rains as a sadistic composer).
Extras, extras: Each disc contains shorts linked to when the movies were in theaters.
Jimmy Carter: Man From Plains
* * *, 2007, Sony, PG, $25
Coming off Neil Young: Heart of Gold, shot primarily in Nashville's Ryman Auditorium, director Jonathan Demme finds another way to "go country," until controversy rears its head.
Back story: Within a narrow framework (which is in part a criticism), here's a more gripping documentary than expected, given its backyard barbecue footage at the beginning. Demme caught Carter on a tour promoting Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, whose title even more than the book itself proved incendiary to Jews. Carter defends himself in a flurry of TV/radio interviews, but rebuttals are heard (Alan Dershowitz among the more thoughtful). And it wouldn't be a Carter documentary without Habitat for Humanity house construction.
Extras, extras: Demme commentary, deleted scenes; more.
ALSO ON DVD:
Stephen King's The Mist
* * 1/2, 2007, Weinstein/Genius, R, $33
At least it beats John Carpenter's The Fog. Last year's only melodrama about tentacled creatures attacking a convenience store also is the answer to a trivia question: "Which King adaptation directed by Frank Darabont did not get nominated for the Oscar?" Compared with its King-Darabont predecessors, this one won't make anyone forget The Shawshank Redemption. But running an hour shorter than The Green Mile, Mist still strains the clock at 126 minutes. Thomas Jane plays an impromptu hero who battles both these "things" and local wackos who are trapped inside the store. The ending, which you'll either hate or give begrudging points to for sheer nerve, definitely has the courage of its convictions.
Picture Snatcher
* * *, 1933, Warner, unrated, $20
According to this prototypically breezy James Cagney early '30s vehicle, a guy can get out of prison (or in Cagney-movie parlance, "the stir") and get hired immediately by a newspaper. It's an appealing concept to journalists, and it's fun seeing the actor play a kind of paparazzo, secretly snapping an electric chair execution for the front page of his rag. This would have been a good movie on which to have had the Tommy gun concession.
Fiorile
* * *, 1993 but '94 in the USA; Koch, unrated, $27
Joining 1982's also-new The Night of the Shooting Stars and 1984's five-part Kaos on DVD, this three-parter from siblings Paolo and Vittorio Taviani chronicles the same cursed Tuscan family for two centuries. As a family member is impregnated in the woods by one of Napoleon's lieutenants, her brother steals a fortune of gold coins left in his charge, leaving the family wealthy but stigmatized. The rest, set in 1903 and then the fascistic 1930s, features the same actors (Claudio Bigagli, Galatea Ranzi) in subsequent eras, combining humanism and fantasy.
Mike Douglas: Moments & Memories
* * *, 2007, Kultur, unrated, $20
Affable Douglas had the most politically edgy daytime variety show ever hosted by an Irish tenor. On this combination clip assemblage and Douglas family look-back, guests include John Lennon and Yoko Ono (who co-hosted for a week), Alfred Hitchcock, Ingrid Bergman, Bob Hope with tiny prodigy Tiger Woods and, in a head-spinning mix that was typical, Martin Luther King Jr. with singer Tony Martin.
Bobby Deerfield
* 1/2; 1977, Sony, PG, $20
Sydney Pollack directed this notorious Al Pacino-Marthe Keller bomb, which combines the auto racing and cancer genres to extremely pokey effect. There is one memorably twisted "Blanche, hurry in here fast to see this" kind of moment: Al's Mae West imitation, which isn't uncorked every day.
Due Tuesday: We'll take some oil and a milkshake with There Will Be Blood;Peppy Hit the Deck and other MGM musicals; The Adventures of Baron Munchausen in a new edition (Blu-ray, too).
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