New on DVD

Winnipeg Babysitter

LOCAL artist Daniel Barrow compiled this loose assortment of footage from Videon's cable access shows of the '80s and '90s as a kind of celebration of the DIY sensibility.

Here is a masked Greg Klymkiw hosting the fake survivalist show Survival with masked guests including Guy Maddin and Kyle McCulloch (two guys who, it may be safely said, went on to bigger things, the latter as a writer for South Park). Here are the hard rock shows Metal Inquisition (starring the puppet metal band Iron Toast) and Alternative Rock Stand. Here's the oddball kids show Magic Mike's Castle and the sublime-artsy 1996 show Delirious Photoplay by Drue Langlois and Myles Langlois.

Of course, the most visible stars of Winnipeg public access were Ron and Natalie Pollock of The Pollock and Pollock Gossip Show, an attempt by the brother-and-sister act at an interview/variety format that usually degenerated into a long exercise in look-at-me exhibitionism, with Ron doing a kind of improvised karaoke and Natalie vamp-dancing in alarmingly short, low-cut dresses.

I still find the Pollocks impossible to watch, but Barrow is a more generous soul, insistently positioning them as worthy contributors to Winnipeg culture, even presenting a DVD extra in the form of a biographical "music video" set to the appalling Ron and Natalie original song Six Times.

The DVD is available for purchase at McNally Robinson, Kustom Kulture and Music Trader. 'Ö'Ö'Ö1/2

Crank: High Voltage

IF the '70s was the decade when Hollywood made movies specifically for potheads, writer/co-directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor seem to have been targeting tweakers, spiking their movies with high energy, flashy visuals and dubious logic.

But just as drugs will eventually take their toll, so too does N/T's approach to filmmaking. The guys bottom out with this sequel, which sees Crank hitman Chev Chelios (Jason Statham) surviving that helicopter plunge from the last movie, only to be shovelled off the pavement and taken by a Chinese mob intent on harvesting all of Chev's hardy body parts for sale to the highest bidder.

In particular, Chev's heart has been purloined by an aged Asian mob boss (David Carradine, making an even less graceful exit than his real-life adios). Chev wakes up grumpy from his coma with an artificial heart, which requires frequent electrical boosting via car battery, Tasers, power lines, and -- in a groaningly gratuitous repeat of the last film's public sex scene -- body friction.

The filmmakers use a skeptical newscaster (a droll John de Lancie) to let the audience know the proceedings will be too stupid to be taken seriously. But around the time Chev is stopped on his mission by a picket line of striking porn stars (?!), you realize they are deliberately targeting a stupid, undiscriminating audience to gratify by any means necessary, including crude stereotypes (Bai Ling plays a psychotically obsessed Asian hooker from the "love-you-long-time" school of subtlety), crude action (Chev gets information from a henchman by using a shotgun as a proctological probe), crude humour (Efren Ramirez plays a vengeful Chev confederate afflicted with "full-body Tourette's Syndrome") and crude violence (another henchman slices his nipples off as a gesture of fealty to his psycho boss). 'Ö1/2

�ñº IMPORTANT THINGS WITH DEMETRI MARTIN

THE benign-surrealist comic Demetri Martin gets a fitting showcase with Season 1 of the Comedy Channel series in which he takes on multiple topics -- coolness, brains, chairs -- and riffs on them via standup, sketches and songs.

It's no coincidence Martin was cast as the star of Taking Woodstock. He has a decidedly hippie sensibility to his comedy, leavened with a Stephen Wright-like sense of the deadpan.

The law school dropout brings a playful, insouciant take to his topics. I like a sketch where a young man realizes his dream of dining with his heroes Benjamin Franklin, William Shakespeare and Galileo, only to witness the men engaging in embarrassing, middle-aged flirting with their TGIF waitress.

Although Martin's material is mostly clean, he drops the occasional F-bomb and one series of sketches involves an S&M couple employing a bad choice of safe word: Bill Pullman.

"Bill Paxton!" screams the agonized hubby, to no avail. 'Ö'Ö'Ö1/2

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition September 10, 2009 E4