Ulrich, Skeet

Jericho - The Second Season

JERICHO: THE SECOND SEASON (DVD MOVIE)

As Good As It Gets

For all of its conventional plotting about an obsessive-compulsive curmudgeon (Jack Nicholson) who improves his personality at the urging of his gay neighbor (Greg Kinnear) and a waitress (Helen Hunt) who inspires his best behavior, this is one of the sharpest Hollywood comedies of the 1990s. Nicholson could play his role in his sleep (the Oscar he won should have gone to Robert Duvall for The Apostle), but his mischievous persona is precisely necessary to give heart to his seemingly heartless character, who is of all things a successful romance novelist. As a single mom with a chronically asthmatic young son, Hunt gives the film its conscience and integrity (along with plenty of wry humor), and she also won an Oscar for her wonderful performance. Greg Kinnear had to settle for an Oscar nomination (while cowriter-director James L. Brooks was inexplicably snubbed by Oscar that year), but his work was also singled out in the film's near-unanimous chorus of critical praise. It's questionable whether a romance between Hunt and the much older Nicholson is entirely believable, but this movie's smart enough--and charmingly funny enough--to make it seem endearingly possible. --Jeff Shannon

Jericho - The First Season

Part-Lost, part-The Day After, television's first Code Orange serial drama very effectively taps into palpable post-9/11 dread. The residents of Jericho are literally in the dark when they are cut off from civilization in the wake of a nuclear blast. Has the United States been attacked? How many cities were destroyed? Was it terrorists, or something way more sinister? It is up to Johnston Green (an Emmy-worthy Gerald McRaney), the town's mayor (and series bedrock), to calm the community, keep its citizens from turning on each other, and protect them from predatory outsiders. Johnston's son, Jake (Skeet Ulrich), a "screw-up," returns home just prior to the blast following a mysterious five-year absence. Jake is at odds with his estranged father, who is running for reelection, and his brother, Eric (Kenneth Mitchell), his deputy. Nor is he welcomed back by his former girlfriend, Emily (Ashley Scott), now engaged to a man who is missing following the blast. With the fate of America in the balance, one would think that "small town problems" wouldn't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy new world, but it is Jericho's human dramas that resonate most deeply.

On the most cherished TV shows, characters come to feel like family. Jericho's characters come to feel like neighbors. Dale (Erik Knudson), the orphaned teenage outcast, forms an unexpected friendship with the town's spoiled mean girl, Skylar (Candace Bailey). Robert Hawkins (Lennie James), just arrived in town, introduces himself as a former cop from St. Louis, but his secret basement command center suggests otherwise. Gray Anderson (Michael Gaston), a mayoral candidate, politicizes the disaster to undermine Johnston. Stanley (Brad Beyer), a farmer, falls in love with his condescending IRS auditor from Washington, D.C. (Alicia Coppola). And Eric plans to leave his wife, Alice (Darby Stanchfield) for bartender Mary (Clare Carey). But at the heart of Jericho's first season is Jake's hard-earned redemption in his family's (and Emily's) eyes (suddenly, he's a regular MacGyver, able to perform a tracheotomy with a juice box straw!). Star Trek has its Trekkies/-ers and Laurel and Hardy its fraternal organization, the Sons of the Desert. Jericho has its "Nuts," who, in heroic It Takes a Village spirit, mounted a monumental campaign to rescue the series after it had been cancelled. Fans posted a barrage of videos on You Tube and deluged the studio with peanuts (the significance is explained in the season finale). "What is it about this town that has you so addicted to it?" someone asks Emily at one point. Just watch a couple of episodes, and you'll also be hooked. This First Season set should rally Jericho's army and inspire new recruits. --Donald Liebenson

JERICHO is a drama about what happens when a nuclear mushroom cloud suddenly appears on the horizon, plunging the residents of a small, peaceful Kansas town into chaos, leaving them completely isolated and wondering if they're the only Americans left alive. But in this time of crisis, as sensible people become paranoid, personal agendas take over and well-kept secrets threaten to be revealed, some people will find an inner strength they never knew they had and the most unlikely heroes will emerge.

Into the West

Spanning 65 years and several generations, Into the West succeeds as an ambitious compendium of authentic American history. Originally broadcast in the summer of 2005 as a six-part miniseries on TNT, it's the kind of well-intentioned epic that can't possibly satisfy everyone, and some critics complained that it covers too much territory, with characters functioning more as archetypes than full-blooded human beings. Criticisms aside, Into the West admirably achieves the goal of executive producer Steven Spielberg, who envisioned this expansive project as an accurate and corrective history lesson with long-term educational value. Placing important emphasis on the Native American perspective, it follows the Lakota Indians as they are gradually overwhelmed by the white man's irrevocable westward expansion. As conceived by playwright/screenwriter William Mastrosimone, the drama uses two primary symbols--the wagon wheel and the Lakota medicine wheel--to join the Lakota story with that of the Wheelers, a Virginia family of wheelwrights who witness many of the 19th century's pivotal historical milestones. From the pioneering explorations of mountain men in 1825 to the tragic massacre of downtrodden Lakota at Wounded Knee in 1891, these parallel storylines encompass migrating wagon trains, the California Gold Rush, construction of the transcontinental railroad, the violence of Quantrill's Raiders, and much, much more.

Through it all, Into the West preserves Lakota customs and language (accompanied by English subtitles) with unprecedented authenticity. In showing how Native cultures were systematically oppressed by the white man's westward capitalism, this tragic tale is inevitably heartbreaking, although it ends on a hopeful note of cultural preservation. Some violent content from the original TNT broadcast has been edited for this DVD release to better accommodate classroom viewing, but Into the West still qualifies as essential viewing for anyone seeking an inclusive dramatization of truthful American history, as opposed to the wildly inaccurate and woefully biased accounts that dominated for decades. With different directors for all six parts, the miniseries is remarkably consistent in tone and vision, its outstanding production values matched by the excellence of a prestigious and well-chosen cast including Irene Bedard (who gives the standout performance in a half-white/half-Lakota role spanning decades), Keri Russell, Skeet Ulrich, Balthazar Getty, Matthew Modine, Graham Greene, Wes Studi, Beau Bridges, Sean Astin, Lance Henriksen, Rachael Leigh Cook, Keith Carradine, and others too numerous to mention. They all contribute to a heartfelt tapestry of bicultural history, both tragic and inspiring, and impressive enough to make its flaws easily forgiven.

DVD features
A standard making-of documentary covers all aspects of the production of Into the West, with a brief introductory comment by Steven Spielberg. The "Communication Gap" featurette explores the challenge of translating dialogue into authentically spoken Lakota language. Also included is a survey (with interview clips) of the large cast; the original TNT promo trailer; and a music video of the miniseries-inspired song "World on Fire," combining Into the West footage with a performance by Sarah McLachlan and Robbie Robertson. --Jeff Shannon

Experience one of the most definitive and triumphant chapters in American history by journeying Into the West with this powerful 4-disc DVD set. Presented by TNT in association with DreamWorks Television and executive produced by Steven Spielberg, this 12-TV-hour event contains all 6 timeless episodes of the action-packed mini-series and boasts an entire disc of exclusive bonus features. Chronicling the struggles, heartache and conquests of two inspiring families, Into the West captures the hopes and perseverance of both the explorers who risked everything to fulfill their dreams and the land's indigenous people forced to watch their way of life disappear. Featuring an ensemble cast of Hollywood's brightest stars, including Beau Bridges, Graham Greene, Matthew Modine and Keri Russell, Into the West is an American Dream saga that Entertainment Weekly calls "epic in scope and cast."

The Craft (Special Edition)

If Buffy the Vampire Slayer represents the lighter side of high school as a macabre experience, here's a movie that asks the burning question, "What happens when angst-ridden teenagers develop supernatural powers?" More to the point, how do four outcast teenaged witches handle their ability to cast wicked spells on the taunting classmates who've nicknamed them "The Bitches of Eastwick"? The answer, of course, is "don't get mad, get even." That's about all there is to this terminally silly movie, which makes up for its ludicrous plot by letting its young female cast have a field day as they indulge their dark fantasies. Fairuza Balk is enjoyable as the most wicked of the witches, and is therefore the focus of the film's most dazzling special effects. But it's Neve Campbell from television's Party of Five who made this film a modest box-office hit, just before she became her generation's fright-movie favorite in Scream and its popular sequel. --Jeff Shannon

Ride with the Devil

Great period pictures make you feel as if you've stepped into another era, heard its language, breathed its spirit, and come away with a fresh perspective on that time as well as your own. Ride with the Devil is one of those special films--why wasn't it more widely embraced by reviewers and filmgoers? Did it rely too much on our patience for slow accumulation of unforced rhythms and meanings (as opposed to The Patriot, which "moved" audiences with cattle-prod simplicity and manipulation)? Ride with the Devil--smart, handsome, tenderly awed by how individual lives get ambushed by history--is ripe for rediscovery.

The Civil War of battlefields and plantation houses is nowhere to be seen here. Instead we see the war as an improvised and largely blundering but very bloody feud among neighbors in the border state of Missouri. In this bucolic war zone--more than a little reminiscent of the Balkans in the late 1990s--the Taiwanese-born director Ang Lee (Sense and Sensibility) traces the destinies of several young Southern bushwhackers (guerrilla fighters) as they experience violence, the seasons, and different kinds of love. Skeet Ulrich draws the aristocratic glamour role (and top billing), but he's overshadowed by Tobey Maguire as a first-generation American, the magnificent Jeffrey Wright (a shameful oversight at Oscar time) as a freed slave fighting beside his former master, and singer Jewel in a very natural acting debut as the young widow who graces all their lives. The title The Birth of a Nation was already taken, but by the end of this movie you feel it would have applied here. -- Richard T. Jameson

Scream (Dimension Collector's Series)

With the smash hit Scream, novice screenwriter Kevin Williamson and veteran horror director Wes Craven (A Nightmare on Elm Street) revived the moldering corpse of the teen horror picture, both creatively and commercially, by playfully acknowledging the exhausted clichés and then turning them inside out. Scream is a postmodern slasher movie, a horror film that cleverly deconstructs horror films, then reassembles the dead tissue, and (like Frankenstein's monster) creates new life. When a serial killer starts hacking up their fellow teens, the media-savvy youngsters of Scream realize that the smartest way of sticking around for the sequel is to avoid the terminal behaviors that inevitably doom supporting players in the movies. They've seen all the movies, and the rules of the genre are like second nature to them. One of the scariest/funniest setups features a kid watching John Carpenter's seminal Halloween on video. As Jamie Lee Curtis is shadowed by Michael Meyers and the kid on the couch yells at her to turn around, Craven reverses his camera and we see that the kid should be taking his own advice. The fresh-faced young cast (including Drew Barrymore, Neve Campbell, Skeet Ulrich, Courtney Cox, and David Arquette) is fun to watch, and their tart dialogue is sprinkled with enough archly self-conscious pop-culture references to make Quentin Tarantino blush. --Jim Emerson

A crowd-pleasing smash hit with a sizzling cast -- critics are calling SCREAM the hippest thriller of the year! Afer a series of mysterious deaths, a seemingly peaceful community becomes a place where no one is safe ... and everyone is suspect! That's when an offbeat group of friends rally to unlock the town's deadly secrets ... and get caught up in a lively mix of thrills, chills, and surprises! With hot stars Drew Barrymore (CHARLIE'S ANGELS), Courteney Cox (TV's FRIENDS), Neve Campbell (54), Skeet Ulrich (AS GOOD AS IT GETS), and David Arquette (BEAUTIFUL GIRLS).

Jericho - The Complete Series

JERICHO: THE COMPLETE SERIES (DVD MOVIE)

Track Down

Based on an incredible true story, this intense high-tech crime thriller features Skeet Ulrich (SCREAM), Donal Logue (TV's GROUNDED FOR LIFE), and Russell Wong (TWISTED) in an amazing all-star cast! For years Kevin Mitnick (Ulrich) -- the most notorious computer hacker in the nation -- had eluded Federal agents while using the latest electronic gadgetry to break into countless computers and gain access to sensitive and valuable information. But when he breaches the system of leading computer crimes expert Tsutomu Shimomura (Wong), it sets off an epic chase through cyberspace between a pair of hard-driven geniuses operating on different sides of the law! Also starring Tom Berenger (TV's PEACEMAKER), Christopher McDonald (SPY KIDS 2), Master P (HOLLYWOOD HOMICIDE) and Amanda Peet (THE WHOLE TEN YARDS) in this electrifying modern adventure!

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