Welcome to VanRamblings’ newest weekly feature, New on DVD. Each and every Thursday, VanRamblings will point you in the direction of the week’s best new DVD releases available at your local home entertainment store.

Woefully overlooked at Christmas-time, and almost completely misunderstood, director Anthony Minghella’s adaptation of Charles Frazier’s best-selling novel, Cold Mountain was little short of magnificent, an epic movie that is all at once as rudely violent, treacherous and politically charged as the source work, yet at times managed a picaresque, hurtfully romantic, chastely sexy, and warmly humorous tone that proves entirely inviting.
How it is that Nicole Kidman’s performance as a privileged Southern Belle was overlooked for a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her work on this Christmas 2003 movie release beggars belief. Grand, poignant, heartbreaking, and exhiliarating in equal measure, Cold Mountain is a must early summer DVD rental (also available on VHS).

Were VanRamblings able to say the same of The Perfect Score, a middling teenage heist comedy. Director Brian Robbins, the former Head of the Class actor, has helmed a number of laclustre teen projects. The only sexy things in this tepid, forgettable teen movie are Scarlett Johansson’s cherry-printed underpants and Leonardo Nam’s bedroom eyes.

A warm-hearted and surprisingly ambitious sequel to the 2002 hit, Barbershop 2: Back in Business is less cartoonish and more generous than the original. From the often affecting flashbacks of Cedric The Entertainer’s early days in the shop during the combustible 1960s and early 1970s (which also give Cedric more time to riff and rip) to the wary eye it casts on contemporary political hypocrisy, Barbershop 2 finds hope in friendship, respect and community, and comfort in the company of a first-rate cast of African American actors, including Ice Cube, Eve and Sean Patrick Thomas.

And, finally this week, Seducing Dr. Lewis, about which Entertainment Weekly’s Lisa Schwarzbaum wrote: “In Jean-François Pouliot’s internationally charming, award-laden comedy Seducing Dr. Lewis, a guppy-size French Canadian fishing village in need of a resident doctor welcomes a smooth Montreal plastic surgeon offering a month’s medical services to expunge a minor drug charge … but while Dr. Christopher Lewis plans a short stay, the citizenry, led by the town’s wily mayor, scheme to ensure longer-term commitment: They reinvent themselves as an irresistible, quaintly authentic Eden built on lies … there’s shrewd wit to Pouliot’s gentle, no-bull farce.” And, by the way, she gives the movie a B+.

In Vancouver, it’s spring break. Some 538,000 children across the province of British Columbia children are off school for the next 9 days, and parents are scrambling to find something with which to keep their children occupied during this period.
How fortunate, then, that Columbia Tri-Star home video has just released Mona Lisa Smile, an engaging and watchable “noble teacher” period drama (think Dead Poet’s Society) about a progressive art-history professor (Julia Roberts) who transports her bohemian West Coast sensibilities to the upper-crust East Coast Wellesley College. On teacher Katherine Watson’s first day in class, she discovers that the student body is all brain and no imagination. The girls are hyperintelligent slaves to the textbook, mere regurgitators of established wisdom — including the widely held belief that the degree they want is just flypaper to attract the husband they need. Exemplary feminist melodrama, Mona Lisa Smile is this week’s VanRamblings.com video / DVD recommendation. And a good one it is, too.
Also, new at your local video store this second weekend in March: Undefeated, a made-for-HBO-TV story about a boxer who rises in rank to be the champion of his weight class only to lose touch with his principles; and, Red Water, the story of a pair of ruthless criminals who search for stolen drug money that’s been dropped in a river (do you think that there might be a man-eating bull shark in that river?).

The video / DVD of the week, this week, is Richard Linklater’s inspired rock ‘n’ roll comedy, School of Rock. Starring Jack Black in a break-out performance — as a masquerading substitute teacher who is a manic devotee of ’70s musical bombast, including Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath and AC/DC — this DVD is exuberant, raucous and thoroughly endearing fun.
As he did with Dazed and Confused and Before Sunrise, Linklater provides the viewer with subtext and sobering reality. In the case of Black’s Dewey Finn, he shows us a man who hasn’t realized his dreams; although Dewey won’t be famous, he does finally find his niche: as a nurturer and promoter of other people’s talent.
Also new on video early in March: Looney Tunes: Back in Action, a not always successful live-action-meets-animation kid flick; Good Boy!, a simple and intermittently satisfying tale of a boy who wants to keep his dog; and two dreadful, absolutely forgettable films, Cold Creek Manor and Duplex.

Well, here it is Friday night, and Blockbuster beckons. What to rent tonight is the old refrain, and wandering about the store aimlessly in search of entertaining video fare has become the agenda de l’heure.
Ridley Scott’s Matchstick Men is the pick of the week, an idiosyncratic, tear-your-heart out grifter tale that promises a great deal, and delivers more. Nicolas Cage is absolutely terrific in this engagingly quirky, keeps-you-guessing, caper puzzle comedy-drama.
Patricia Clarkson received a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nod for her work in the Katie Holmes indie vehicle Pieces of April (when she was much better in The Station Agent), an otherwise forgettable low-budget, quasi-charmer that came and went, to little fanfare, this past autumn.
Otherwise, there’s The Missing, which I missed largely because not much good was written about the film (although generally I don’t rely on the opinions of others to sway me one way or another when it comes to cinema); My Life Without Me, a tear-jerker about a cancer victim (Sarah Polley) with two months to live; the execrable Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over, and the barely-released, Ryan Reynolds-starring caper flick, Foolproof.
Perhaps the sleeper of the week will prove to be Sylvia, starring Gwyneth Paltrow, about which the New York Observer’s Andrew Sarris wrote, “a wondrously illuminating artistic experience for its ideal audience — people like me who know a little but not much about the explosive Plath-Hughes fusion of unbridled poetic temperaments in a tauntingly prosaic world.”