The Men Who Stare at Goats
PICK OF THE WEEK

Comedy; rated R for language, some drug content and brief nudity; also available on Blu-ray

The Gist: Greenhorn reporter Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor) stumbles across a top secret government psi ops program in Iraq, learning “the way of the Jedi” from the likes of George Clooney, Jeff Bridges and Kevin Spacey.

The Lowdown: This very funny and slyly satirical comedy from director Grant Heslov is a real pleasure, and drew all that top-shelf acting talent for a reason. Intriguingly, the film is based on actual events. As the fascinating DVD extras reveal, the “New Earth Army” – an experiment exploring possible military applications of New Age psychic phenomena – really did exist. “Goats” can be enjoyed on one level as a dextrous madcap comedy, and on another as a kind of gonzo satire of military culture and the madness of war.

The Extras: Generous; two mini-docs detailing the real-life events behind the script, plus audio commentaries, deleted scenes and character bios.

The Bottom Line: One of the best examples I’ve seen of a film that is greatly improved with the full-on DVD treatment. The extras, particularly the “Goats Declassified” doc, are critical to appreciating the movie’s delightful real-world weirdness.

Double Secret Bonus Tip: Casting Ewan “Obi-Wan” McGregor as the aspiring Jedi warrior is inspired – attentive “Star Wars” fans will be rewarded with several clever in-jokes.

The African Queen
Adventure romance; unrated (safe for kids); also available on Blu-ray

The Gist: Gin-swilling riverboat captain Charlie Allnut (Humphrey Bogart) and uptight missionary Rose Sayer (Katharine Hepburn) find adventure and love in World War I East Africa.

The Lowdown: Making its long-awaited debut on DVD, director John Huston’s classic earned Bogart the 1951 Best Actor Oscar and endures as one of the great movie star pairings of all time. When the Germans sack her tiny missionary village, Rose reluctantly makes her escape with Charlie on his ramshackle riverboat.

The Extras: Sadly skimpy; a single hourlong doc, “Embracing Chaos: Making the African Queen.”

The Bottom Line: Classic film fans will want to check it out, while those weaned on modern movies can marvel at the vast gulf between acting styles of 1951 and today. Believe it or not, Bogie and Kate’s broad, almost-caricatured performances were considered quite subtle back in the day.

Double Secret Bonus Tip: Hepburn, appalled at the heavy drinking of Bogart and Huston on location in Africa, drank only water and subsequently suffered from dysentery throughout the shoot. That’s one to grow on, kids.

The T.A.M.I. Show: Collector’s Edition
Concert film; unrated (safe for kids)

The Gist: One of the great “lost” concert films of all time, “The T.A.M.I. Show” is a fascinating document of rock ‘n’ roll in its rough-and-tumble adolescence.

The Lowdown: Filmed at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium on October 29, 1964, the T.A.M.I. Show – an acronym for Teenage Awards Music International – features an impossible procession of rock ‘n’ roll royalty. Chuck Berry. James Brown. The Beach Boys. Jan and Dean. Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. The Supremes. And a little British R&B combo out of the U.K. known as the Rolling Stones. Because of legal issues, The T.A.M.I. Show has never before been released on home video in any format.

The Extras: Commentary track by director Steve Binder; original radio ads and theatrical trailers (with commentary by filmmaker John Landis) and an illuminating commemorative booklet with additional details on the T.A.M.I. saga.

The Bottom Line: All performances are 100 percent live, with the vocal acts backed by the famous “Wrecking Crew” band of L.A. studio musicians – including Glen Campbell on guitar and Leon Russell on piano.

Double Secret Bonus Tip: Look closely at the background dancers and you might spot a young Teri Garr, and an even younger Toni Basil (“Hey Mickey”) – credited as assistant choreographer.

‘Amelia,” starring Hilary Swank as famed aviatrix Amelia Earhart, is a perfectly serviceable, standard-issue Hollywood biopic that hits all the requisite notes and risks little. It’s an enjoyable movie experience and, at under two hours, admirably restrained in length. I only wish the movie, like its heroine, had a little more guts.

It’s a problem of form, really. “Amelia” is done about as well as this type of movie can be done – but that’s the problem. The celebrity biopic has become Hollywood’s most tired and predictable genre. If you recall, we were tipped to this problem in 2007 with the very funny mock-biopic “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.” “Walk” tackled the subgenre of the musical biopic, but its cautionary lessons can very easily be extrapolated – and, evidently, ignored.

It’s too bad, because “Amelia” has a lot going for it. There’s the terrific performance by Swank, who once again provides a virtual clinic on screen acting. She does some amazing technical work here, nailing the particular cadences and mannerisms of 1930s speech. The photography is beautiful – several bravura sequences show Amelia flying through electrical storms or diving recklessly to keep her plane from icing over.

But everything is jammed sideways into the conventional biopic template. You have your expositional voiceovers. Your sweeping and intrusive musical score. Your improbably declarative dialogue in which characters establish their motivations. When a suitor proposes marriage, for instance, Amelia’s reply – describing herself blissfully as a free-spirited “vagabond of the air” – isn’t anything anyone would actually say in that situation.

But it does sound like an excellent ninth draft of a screenplay. Scripts like this don’t trust the viewer to infer the moral of the story. Instead, it’s all provided in dialogue and musical cues, right before the didactic montage sequence. The real nadir of the genre may be last winter’s sadly deflated “Notorious,” which distilled the fascinating story of hip-hop star Christopher “Biggie Smalls” Wallace to a procession of repetitive biopic riffs.

Hollywood desperately needs some visionary director to come in and reinvent the form. The weird and wily Bob Dylan alt-biopic “I’m Not There” was a step in the right direction. By artfully subverting biopic tropes – casting multiple actors in the lead role, say – director Todd Haynes gleefully sprinted off in a new direction entirely.

Extras on the “Amelia” DVD set include a good assortment of deleted scenes and some interesting archival newsreels.

Also new to DVD this week, ” The House of the Devil” is an explicitly old-school horror movie from director Ti West designed to look, sound and feel like a 1982 direct-to-video cult classic. Cult is the operative term here – “Devil” is directly inspired by the early ’80s media mini-craze for stories of Satanic cults preying on America’s teenagers.

Here’s another film in which form overwhelms content, but in this case it’s a good thing indeed. From title graphics to wardrobe choices to the 16-mm film stock, “Devil” reverently evokes those breathless ’80s horror flicks in which pretty young baby sitters make poor decisions regarding staircases, locked doors and kitchen knives.

Director West is genuinely faithful to the form – this isn’t some meta exercise like the “Scream” movies. West also employs the classic suspense strategies more or less invented by Alfred Hitchcock. A bomb under the table explodes – that’s surprise. A bomb under the table doesn’t explode – that’s suspense. “Devil” has one masterful 20-minute passage that’s almost unbearably tense. Only afterward do you realize that nothing actually happened.

The movie’s last act is sufficiently bloody, but doesn’t quite deliver – Satanism just isn’t as spooky as it used to be, I guess. But the real fun here is in “Devil’s” affectionate allegiance to the ’80s – veterans of the decade will enjoy those glorious feathered hairdos and high-waist acid wash jeans. (In a clever marketing gimmick, the filmmakers even issued some promotional copies of “Devil” on VHS.) Extras are modest – two brief production docs and some very disposable deleted scenes.

On the other end of the scary spectrum, the horror-comedy ” Zombieland” stars Woody Harrelson and Jesse Eisenberg as odd-couple road trippers navigating the wastes of an America ravaged by, yes, a zombie outbreak. En route to Hollywood, they meet a pair of resourceful sisters (Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin) and briefly rely on the hospitality of an A-list movie star, playing himself in an extended cameo.

Very funny, very gory and spectacularly over-the-top, “Zombieland” achieves what it sets out after. Harrelson and Eisenberg have a good comedy tag team thing going, and the movie star cameo sequence has a couple dozen big laughs all by itself.

“Zombieland” is goofy fun and entirely satisfying, so long as you know what you’re getting into. If “House of the Devil” is the bomb not going off, “Zombieland” is the bomb that keeps exploding, forever. Extras include a couple production docs and commentary. Also stay for a final scene after the end credits.

On the off-chance you’re in the mood for something other than zombies, aviatrices or the 1980s, consider the fascinating and surprisingly poignant basketball documentary ” More Than a Game,” which charts the ascent of NBA superstar LeBron James and his high school teammates – the “Akron Fab Five.”

I lost interest in the pro game years ago, after life in the Triangle introduced me to the beauty of college basketball. (Hmm, “introduced” might not be the term. Relentlessly indoctrinated, maybe.) But “Game” has nothing to do with James’ pro career.

Seven years in the making, “Game” began as a class assignment for film student (and Akron native) Kristopher Belman. As the team rocketed to success, Belman followed along, befriended by the coach and players and given an access no one else could match.

Amazingly, the four players who constituted the core of the Akron team that took three national championships had been playing together since fourth grade. (They picked up their fifth starter in high school.) Led by the preternaturally talented James, they defeated powerhouse teams from coast-to-coast. As their coach Dru Joyce says, these were essentially national high school all-star teams, and he was fielding five kids from the neighborhood.

Micah – day-trader, tech fetishist and requisite rational skeptic – decides the best way to document the phenomena is to set up a digital camera in the bedroom. This weirds out Katie for several reasons, understandably. But most important, Katie has a gut feeling that the camera will only provoke whatever is haunting them.

And, wow – when Katie’s right, she’s right. Things go from bad to much worse, each incident recorded in the creepy black light of the camera’s infrared lens. I don’t know about you, but ever since I was kid I’ve thought about ghosts most when I’m in the dark, under the covers, listening to bumps in the night.

Director Oren Peli makes canny use of the video camera gimmick. One creepy sequence shows Katie apparently sleepwalking as she stands menacingly over the sleeping Micah. Then the time counter in the corner of the frame fast forwards as Katie simply stands there, staring at him, for hours. It’s a spooky image, and a clever one.

On the DVD player, in the dubious comfort of your own home, the film has an additional resonance missing in theaters.

The single-disc DVD includes the filmmakers’ original ending, changed before wide release at the suggestion of producer Steven Spielberg. I think the original is more subtle and satisfying.

And now a word from the realm of animation. 2009 was a banner year for animated films, specifically animated films for grown-ups. Among the year’s triumphs – the dark fairy tale “Coraline,” the morally charged Israeli film “Waltz with Bashir,” and Pixar’s latest triumph, the sublime adventure “Up.”

Cycling to DVD are two more animated jewels. “9,” expanded by director Shane Acker from his own short film, is a riot of inventive imagery in the “stitchpunk” animation style.

In a post-apocalyptic future (we sure are seeing a lot of these lately), a rag doll comes to life to find that humanity has committed suicide. Rather messily, too. Designated only as “#9,” according to the stitching on his back, our hero finds that he is but one of a series of rag dolls, imbued by their now-dead creator with life force, and asked to carry forth into the future a rather critical series of parcels.

“9″ is most effective in its quieter moments, particularly in scenes of the wrecked future landscape, littered with dead technology and shrouded by a bruised sky.

Like “Up,” “9″ is an example of state-of-the-art computer graphics technology used to achieve an artistic vision. If the film’s innovative spirit seems confined to design at the expense of story, that’s all right. You can just move up the rental aisle and grab up ” Sita Sings the Blues,” my vote for best animated film of the year.

“Sita,” directed by American cartoonist and animator Nina Paley, is structured around an ancient Hindu fable and several animation styles, integrated torch songs by 1920s blues vocalist Annette Hanshaw, and a parallel modern-day story from director Paley that is largely autobiographical. In the director’s words, the film is “a tale of truth, justice and a woman’s cry for equal treatment.”

Paley did all the animation herself, using her home computer and an assortment of 2-D animation techniques. Threads of the story are assigned their own graphical treatment – the mythological sequences distinguished from the musical numbers; the shadow-puppet narration from the modern-day story. That it all hangs together is testament to Paley’s chops as a visual artist. That it’s also wistful, irreverent and genuinely funny is proof of Paley’s skill as a cartoonist, that most underappreciated of crafts.

Because of some arcane copyright issues regarding the old Hanshaw songs, Paley had to pay out-of-pocket to preserve the film’s musical numbers, and agree to some arbitrary distribution restrictions.

Admirably, Paley fought back. Using unorthodox distribution methods, such as free online downloads and the Creative Commons license (the same license Wikipedia operates under), Paley is relying on voluntary payments to augment any money she might see from the limited DVD pressing. (The DVD does include extras, including a 30-minute interview with Paley.) Watch for great things from Paley, whose tenacity has made her something of an icon in free-culture circles.

Special thanks to Steven Kent, author of The First Quarter: A 25-Year History of Video Games and Donald A. Thomas, Webmaster of the online video game museum I.C. When (www.icwhen.com.)

1972

Magnavox Odyssey Released
The first home video console, the Magnavox Odyssey, is released in the US. The fully analog system is fully silent as well.

Pong Heard ‘Round the World
Nolan Bushnell test-markets his protovideo game, Pong, at Andy Capp’s Tavern in Sunnyvale, California. The arcade video game as we know it is born. The sonar-blip sound that’s generated as a digital ball is batted back and forth proves to be oddly compelling and kind of hypnotic.

1974

Simon Says
Milton Bradley releases Simon, one of the most popular handheld games ever. Simon plays patterns using four separate tones and four different colored lights. You repeat the patterns; then a new note is added every go-around. In that sense, Simon was the first game to incorporate music as a game element–in a very loose, Zen-free jazz kind of way.