DVD Review: Scholastic Storybook Treasures -- Merry Christmas, Splat... and More Winter Stories

Now Available to Own   

  

Using the original artwork that made the pages of the four selected stories come so vividly to life for young readers strengthens the authenticity of the short film adaptations considerable in another fine child’s read-along compilation title from Scholastic.

While you can just choose to lose yourself in the stories, in order to help kids work on their reading skills in the guise of watching a movie, the disc relies on the same format made popular in sing-along DVDs or onscreen karaoke.

Giving viewers the option to turn on or off the light up text and follow along with the narration as color fills each word makes Scholastic’s Storybook Treasures DVD series an ingenious and invaluable asset of reading is fundamental technology as an inexpensive alternative to overpriced, over-complicated tablets and computers.

Nicely timed to the holiday season, Merry Christmas, Splat… and More Winter Stories features the eponymous work along with Fletcher and the Snowflake Christmas, Snowflake Bentley and Owl Moon.

Though Splat is instantly likable in a cartoon character sort of way, the tale of the spoiled cat longing for a really big gift isn’t nearly as narratively appealing as the three stronger stories that follow.

We learn about empathy and looking out for your neighbors in the sweet-natured Fletcher and in are treated to a gorgeously rendered historical tale about a young boy who grew up longing to study snowflakes in the Sean Astin narrated standout Bentley.

Saving the most poetic tale for last, Owl Moon manages to lose you in the evocative use of language and subtle repetition employed throughout author Jane Yolen’s classic book, which is read aloud by Yolen herself.

Light on bonus features save for a brief but fascinating behind-the-scenes tutorial on how the animators brought the images on the page to life onscreen, Splat nonetheless makes up for what it lacks in extras in stellar feature content.

A fine stocking stuffer idea, the disc works well both as simply quality entertainment and also to augment home study in linguistics, supplementing school work and helping out busy moms and dads who – particularly in this busy day and age – may not have time to drop everything and read four storybooks in one sitting multiple times a day. 

Stories Included:
Merry Christmas, Splat by Rob Scotton
Fletcher and the Snowflake Christmas by Julia Rawlinson
Snowflake Bentley by Jacqueline Briggs Martin
Owl Moon by Jane Yolen
   

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What Love Is

Director: Mars Callahan

In The Tao of Steve we learned that guys don’t do opera, in Swingers we learned that every guy needs a wingman and in the movies of Kevin Smith, we learned that guys gossip more than a sorority. Yet, having worked in the theatre, I can confidently tell you that unless they’re desperately trying to woo a date or are over the age of 55, straight guys seldom do theatre.

With undoubtedly this in mind and in an effort to blend theatre together with Swingers and Chasing Amy, writer/director Mars Callahan got in touch with his inner screwball and served up What Love Is, a film so foul it would make Kevin Smith blush and one where dialogue whips by so quickly that the Gilmore Girls heroines would tell them to slow down for fear of a speeding ticket. A raunchy hybrid of sitcoms and confessional theatre and set during a particularly raucous Valentine’s Day night, nothing about this wicked talk-a-thon feels authentic as audiences find themselves half expecting applause or canned laughs after certain punchlines and characters actually enter the room on cue like Norm on Cheers or Kramer on Seinfeld.

When he discovers empty closets and suitcases by the front door, Tom (Cuba Gooding Jr.) reads the obligatory Dear John letter left for him by his girlfriend who’s decided to walk out on him after three years of cohabitation and realizes that in addition to his heartbreak, he must contend for an impromptu party he’d obliviously decided to throw to celebrate what he’d hoped would be his engagement.

Before the other guests arrive, his four boyhood friends trickle in one-by-one (and always on cue) and, with their varied outlooks and attitudes offer Tom advice and speeches for the film’s opening forty minutes that seem so loud, chaotic, and lewd, one wonders if Callahan, perhaps budget strapped, offered a bonus to whichever actor can deliver his monologues the fastest, thereby saving precious film stock and shortening the running time to roughly ninety minutes.

Matthew Lillard sets the film’s tone early on as the self-described misogynistic and homophobic Sal who, saddled with the film’s most shocking yet memorable lines, attacks his character with a ferocity I didn’t realize the actor had in him and it’s easy to imagine that his agent will be mailing his entire opening segment to David Mamet in the hopes of scoring a role as one of the prize-winner’s legendary boors.

In fact, Lillard is so repugnant yet compulsively fascinating that the other actors are nearly helpless in his wake, although the fault seems to lie largely in the script which finds Andrew Daly faced with portraying a one-note, ridiculously penned gay stereotype, Sean Astin relegated to portraying a Birkenstock wearing, granola eating New Age hippie tired of always being labeled as the friend to beautiful women and the writer/director, who turns in a nice performance in an uninteresting role as the happily married Ken.

How and why these characters still remain friends is a mystery as San Francisco Chronicle’s Peter Harlaub memorably described his view of the group by asking viewers to “imagine if the pack from 'The Breakfast Club' were still stuck in detention twenty years later.” While they repeatedly explain that they’ve known each other since grade school, the men in What Love Is prove just as often that they haven’t evolved much since then and it’s all the more apparent when, almost halfway through the film women begin arriving at the party (played by Gina Gershon, Anne Heche and others) and as they walk through the door, must endure starring in a stripper fantasy.

Of course, women and men are as different as Mars and Venus as the media will constantly remind so with little in the way of explanation, Callahan gives the women an abridged opportunity to delineate their own pet peeves and attitudes about dating, love and sex by placing them in the bathroom (of course) where they prove that women can be just as crude as the guys. Again as Hartlaub explained, “If you’re in your late thirties and still trolling for hookups in trendy bars, these characters will probably speak to you. If not, you’re almost certain to find them annoying.”

In other words, consider this reviewer annoyed and while I held out hope that once the two sexes would coexist in the same scene, sparks and words would begin flying, the film’s final act proves to be its most lifeless when cliché induced unsatisfactory conclusions are reached. As rude and clipped as the opening forty minutes were of the film were, had Callahan kept up the pace and managed to write the rest of the supporting players with as much force as he did for Lillard’s Sal, it may have been a successful melding of theatre and film, yet as released and given a bland title destined to blend into the video store shelves, there’s not much to love about What Love Is.

The Final Season

Director: David M. Evans

Typically film critics rail against the perils of predictability and contrivances in contemporary cinema, yet a different attitude seems to be adopted by most when it comes to the All-American genre of underdog sports film that never seems to go out of style. As San Francisco Chronicle writer Mick La Salle wrote, citing the similarity of the genre’s offerings, “Funny thing about theses sports movies. They’re all the same. They’re never bad… they’re rarely exceptional. In fact, their appeal may be their sameness.”

The Final Season is such a case—a warmhearted, inspiring film that despite its modest production values, works the same way that chicken soup does when one has a cold, or mashed potatoes and/or macaroni and cheese do after an awful day—it’s a film that comforts, nourishes, goes down easily and doesn’t ask too much in return. Similar to the quintessential underdog he played in Rudy (one of the best sports films of the 90’s), Sean Astin pulls double duty as both producer and star in this true story, playing unlikely high school baseball coach Kent Stock, who, at the tender age of twenty-four after just two months of assisting the legendary Coach Van Scoyoc (Powers Boothe), finds himself taking over the Norway High School team.

After winning nineteen straight state championships under Van Scoyoc, the small Iowan community with a population of 586, that-- as the townspeople state-- grows baseball players similar to the crops on their farms, must come to terms with bureaucratic changes all made under the guise of “progress” that mandates that the Norway High School Tigers will be playing their final season before merging with the larger Madison High School.

As illustrated in the film, the vindictively villainous School Board President Harvey Makepeace (Marshall Bell) fires Coach Van Scoyoc out of petty spite and, in the hopes of sabotaging the team’s last competitive year, replaces the coach with the impossibly young, earnest Stock whose only experience heading up a team on his own was as a girl’s volleyball coach.

While the primary focus of The Final Season is on the development of the team and interplay between the Norway community, other subplots are introduced and, despite engaging us from the outset, are given little time to satisfactorily develop such as a terrific storyline about a rebellious Chicago teen played by Forbidden Kingdom star Michael Angarano whose widowed father (Tom Arnold) drops him off with his Norway grandparents in the hopes that the change of scenery will turn the young man around.

Angarano, who has some great scenes that beg for more exploration including a few confrontations with the film’s most valuable player, Powers Boothe, is shortchanged by the film. Yet these few time-wasting subplots aside including a likable turn by Rachael Leigh Cook as Stock’s love interest, The Final Season is further proof of director David M. Evans’s love of America’s favorite pastime following his terrific family classic The Sandlot, which he’d also penned.

Another solid and slightly above average entry into the overcrowded underdog sports genre, the film manages to further compel audiences with its timely storyline of small communities like Norway becoming ghost-towns when economic and political issues force them to close their schools, leading to devastating effects as businesses follow suit, which is something that seems to be hitting us yet again in the wake of our struggling economy.

Bigger than the Sky

Director: Al Corley

According to Bigger than the Sky's wildly charming and popular star of Portland Community Theatre, Michael (John Corbett), rule number one for his profession is to “never tell anybody in the theatre anything you don’t want everybody else to know.”

Having been a part of the theatre world both as a student actor and later as an employee, it’s a lesson that kept repeating itself again and again as it seemed like everyone from the costume designers to the ticket sellers knew precisely what was happening in everyone’s private life, thanks largely in part to the countless hours actors spend in the theatre where gossip is tangible and relationships begin casually and end messily in love triangles and even infidelity.

The rule of never telling anyone in theatre anything was discovered by Peter Rooker (Marcus Thomas) much too late after the mild-mannered man whose girlfriend has left him and taken 95% of the furniture in their home with her, finds himself intrigued by the local theatre which is holding auditions for a production of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac. Feeling stuck in his dead-end job with a condescending bully of a boss, Peter embarks on a depressing visit to the self-help section of his local bookstore where he's so drawn to the classic play that he impulsively goes to the open audition. After he begins feeling completely overshadowed by his scene with Michael, Peter is questioned about his life and reasons for auditioning off the bat by the unusual and inquisitive director Edwina (Clare Walters).

Later, shockingly cast as Cyrano thanks to his honesty, Peter finds himself overwhelmed by the theatrical process as he’s taken under the wing of Michael and also Michael’s beautiful on-again/off-again girlfriend Grace (Amy Smart) who, until finding herself the target of Peter’s affections, hadn’t considered taking part in her pact with Michael to have an open relationship.

Quickly and admittedly predictably, the film which was written by Three to Tango screenwriter Rodney Patrick Vaccaro begins to mirror Cyrano de Bergerac with Peter as the unlikely hero who falls for Roxanne (Smart’s Grace) from afar while knowing full well that Christian (Corbett’s Michael) is a far more better suited rival for her heart. With a whimsical and overly theatrical structure that at times makes it seem a bit like a fairy tale, Vaccaro’s script which he inexplicably felt was a straight comedy according to most critical reviews, is at its best when it’s being played as an homage to theatre by providing wonderful supporting roles for Sean Astin as the cocky actor Ken Zorbell, Astin’s mother Patty Duke in two quirky roles, and a lovely turn by Allan Corduner as Kippy, the unofficial godfather of the Portland Community Theatre.

The film gains much needed spirit and warmth from the charismatic turns by one of my favorite and most reliable scene stealers John Corbett and by Amy Smart who is becoming a promising actress to watch. However, despite a genuinely touching ending that reminds viewers just why we love theatre, one of the biggest problems of the film lies in the main character, which should be the opposite goal of any work purported to be a version of Cyrano. Although Peter is supposed to be a bland character, based on Marcus Thomas’ largely ineffective and vapid portrayal one can’t help but question if the fault came from the writing, direction or miscast actor, and this does greatly affect one's reaction to the film.

For two better modern updates of Cyrano, there’s no beating Steve Martin’s script and performance in Roxanne or the inventive reverse gender approach from writer Audrey Wells in The Truth About Cats and Dogs. Perhaps in a subtle attempt by the studio to make up for the dull main character, intriguingly yet sadly, the manipulative DVD box for the film focuses on the star quality of Corbett and Smart and provides renters with a summary that mistakenly leads one to believe that Corbett’s Michael is the lead, with virtually no reference to Thomas’ Peter Rooker.