richheldenfels-blog

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<p>When Glen Campbell’s family announced in 2011 that he had Alzheimer’s, few would have been surprised if the hit singer-guitarist had quietly gone away, letting the disease continue its ravages in private.</p>

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<p>NBC has now used two holiday seasons for live musicals, The Sound of Music a year ago and Peter Pan recently. Now they should tackle another classic: South Pacific.</p>

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A few thoughts about Kenny G, Hong Kong -- and whether the smooth-jazz artist should bring some political content to his music.

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"White Collar" Season 5 on DVD 11/4

That's two days before the sixth and final season begins. The official word: Catch up with television’s smartest, sexiest con-man-turned-crime-fighter before the final season! In White Collar’s sizzling Season Five, $1.8 million in gold coins is missing, an elusive precious diamond is about to be found, and Neal Caffrey (Matt Bomer) has a new handler – and a new love interest. But all is fair in love and crime, and the closer Neal gets to the mysterious Rebecca Lowe, the greater the danger for everyone in his life. Go behind the scenes of the electrifying show that also stars Tim DeKay, Tiffani Thiessen and Willie Garson with deleted scenes, commentary and other features only available on DVD! DVD Special Features ● Audio Commentary on “Diamond Exchange” ● Willie Garson: Director Extraordinaire featurette ● Gag Reel ● 13 Deleted Scenes “White Collar” Season Five DVD Street Date: November 4, 2014 Prebook Date: October 1, 2014 Screen Format: Widescreen: 1.78:1 Audio: English Dolby Digital 5.1 Subtitles: English SDH, French, Spanish Total Run Time: 572 Minutes U.S. Rating NR (Not Rated) Closed Captioned: Yes

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He-Man, Yo!

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Jeremy Brett's Holmes on Blu-ray

Jeremy Brett's complete Sherlock Holmes telecasts from 1984 to 1995 coming to Blu-ray Sept. 30 from MPI. Brett's Holmes is one of the best, and his devotion to the Conan Doyle stories was fierce. It was said that while making the shows, Brett would have his copy of the stories on set to make sure there was no unreasonable deviation.

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For those seeking context for Manziel's latest classy act.

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Back to School time: What's your warmup movie?

Below is a column I wrote in 2010 about school movies. Because it was movie-centric, it does not include the TV version of "Friday Night Lights" (which in any case straddles lines about life, sports and school) -- although I did squeeze in a nod for "Freaks and Geeks." Because it was four years ago, it does not include the big-screen "21 Jump Street" or the sequel. And somehow I left out "Rushmore," which I can't explain. But it is an overview of the school-movie genre -- and it does make me ask, what's your favorite school movie? ''What a life — 210 days of school till next vacation.'' — Spanky, Bored of Education It's around this time of year that young people begin to feel like Spanky in that classic Our Gang short. The University of Akron resumes classes on Monday. Akron Public Schools students return on Sept. 1. Folks young and old are now prowling the stores, grabbing fistfuls of pens, pencils and spiral notebooks — and making sure their laptops are in working order. Some are doing this with delight, others with dread. Pretty much everything they have felt has been seen on the big or small screen. And can be revisited for comparison, comfort and anticipation of what the school year holds. With one exception, noted below, all the titles mentioned here have been released on DVD.* School onscreen has been vast; Entertainment Weekly once listed the top 50 high-school movies and still left a lot of that subgenre untouched. Schooling has been part of low-budget, teen-targeted films (Rock 'n' Roll High School, for instance) and prestigious productions. That Our Gang short, Bored of Education, won an Oscar in 1937. Sandra Bullock finally won hers this year for The Blind Side, about a young man being helped past poverty to a high-school education and then college. Among Bullock's rival nominees were Carey Mulligan in An Education, playing a student who derails her plans for higher education by taking up with an older man; and Gabourey Sidibe in Precious, as an illiterate young woman getting help from an alternative school. The Blind Side, Precious and An Education were also Oscar-nominated for best picture, as was A Serious Man, about a '60s physics professor whose dilemmas include a battle with a student over his grade. TV's Freaks and Geeks, though it lasted but one season, remains a classic study of high-school life as well as a major launching pad for, among others, James Franco (Eat Pray Love), Seth Rogen (Knocked Up) and Jason Segel (How I Met Your Mother). School movies have included intense dramas like Hoosiers, Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause; outrageous comedies like Animal House, Revenge of the Nerds, PCU and Superbad, and the John Hughes epics that straddle the line between comedy and drama. Indeed, for young people in the '80s, Hughes was schooling's poet laureate: Pretty in Pink, Sixteen Candles, Weird Science and, most importantly, The Breakfast Club. The Breakfast Club topped Entertainment Weekly's list of the best high-school movies. Its collection of different school types (played by Molly Ringwald, Judd Nelson, Anthony Michael Hall, Emilio Estevez and Ally Sheedy) still resonates with viewers who see themselves in one or the other of the characters. But where that tried to view students seriously, sometimes schools are full of song and dance, and have been so since long before the High School Musical films became a sensation. Grease. Footloose. Fame. Groucho Marx as a university president in Horse Feathers, singing firmly, ''Whatever it is, I'm against it.'' Groucho was an anti-authority figure in a position of authority, but far from the only one. Think also of Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society. Richard Dreyfuss in Mr. Holland's Opus. Battles with authority are a central element of school movies. Schools provide a perfect setting for films in part because they contain all the elements that people have to deal with in other parts of their lives: a longing for love, a need for success, a fear that one mistake will destroy an entire life. Or in the case of the Twilight movies, all of the above, plus vampires and werewolves. But it is questions of authority that dominate, because school movies are soaked in representatives of different aspects of social order. On the grown-up side, you have administrators, teachers and parents — and conflict can arise among any or all of them. The young people in turn may be opposed to the grown-ups, although Rodney Dangerfield in Back to School played a student with the clout, and finances, of a grown-up. (Bing Crosby in his late 50s also went back to school, in the movie High Time. It is not on DVD*.) And students battle each other, as there are usually clearly defined social strata within a school. Those strata are sometimes based on how much money people have. The original Beverly Hills, 90210, for example, began as a story about social status, with two kids from Minnesota (Jason Priestley and Shannen Doherty) thrust into California high life and not equipped to deal with it. Sometimes the strata are determined by roles within the school community (star athletes, for instance), or simply from some vaguely defined idea of what is and is not cool. In Can't Buy Me Love, for instance, Patrick Dempsey becomes cool simply by having a high-status girlfriend — until it's discovered that he has paid her to play a role. The idea was appealing enough to be remade, with an African-American cast, as Love Don't Cost a Thing. Love Don't Cost a Thing starred Nick Cannon, who also struggled with the college social system in the well-regarded Drumline. Tom Cruise's early career was based on school-tied movies like Taps, Risky Business (where working with a prostitute helps get him into college) and All the Right Moves, each with its own authority issues. Lindsay Lohan tried to beat the school social system in Mean Girls. School Ties included Brendan Fraser, Ben Affleck, Chris O'Donnell and Matt Damon in an often effective drama about a Jewish student (Fraser) hiding his faith to get by at a fancy prep school. Much the way School Ties uses academia to look at anti-Semitism, school has also been a place to consider questions of race, going back to at least Blackboard Jungle and up through films like Stand and Deliver, Remember the Titans and The Great Debaters. While the latter three films are all uplifting, school productions have a grim side, especially when students go to extremes to battle the system. The '60s classic If . . . ends with alienated students opening fire on their school's leaders. (It is even more chilling in the post-Columbine world.) Heathers offers murder as a solution to social despair. Carrie shows what happens when students go too far in tormenting a young woman with some special powers. Such stories may make one long for the more benign adventures of an Our Gang comedy. Or to see the anarchic aspects of the Marx Brothers and Animal House as relatively mild. But even if the movies involve actions that almost no one in the audience would take, the emotional currents are recognizable. And doubtless will be as long as the end of summer means heading to class. *There is now a Blu-ray release of the movie for sale on Amazon.com, although it seems curious. http://www.amazon.com/HIGH-TIME-Blu-ray-Bing-Crosby/dp/B00942TX26/ref=sr_1_1?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1408388282&sr=1-1&keywords=High+Time