Best for The Geeks

1)Breaking Bad The Fifth
Season

SONY HOME
VIDEO

One of the
best shows on television
consistently puts out
the best DVD releases and
season five is no exception. This
latest release features excellent
commentary tracks from creator
Vince Gilligan, who explains the
“meth” to his madness; audition
footage; deleted scenes, including
an all-new scene created for the
disc, “Chicks ’N’ Guns”; time-lapse
photography of the writer’s room
(probably a first); an interview with
the great Jonathan Banks, who
talks about how the role of Mike was created as a happy accident when Bob Odenkirk wasn’t available to film; and much more. Once again, Breaking Bad effortlessly shows everyone how it should be done.

2)Adventure Time: The
Complete Second Season

CARTOON NETWORK

Adventure Time follows the
adventures of feisty Finn (voiced
by Jeremy Shada) and superpowered,mouthy companion dog
Jake (John DiMaggio, who also
voiced robot Bender on Futurama),
who fight evil from their spacious
tree-house base camp in a fantasy
world filled with all kinds of crazy
supernatural creatures. The show
has a wild, unpredictable look and
thrives on absurd humor — with
characters that range from living
pastries to slavering vampires,
it weirdly reminds
me of an old Ladislaw
Starewicz stop-motion
movie, but done in
colorful cel animation.
Adults will
love the unhinged
plotlines, but the
show still manages
to impart
lessons about
behavior and
expectations to children, as well as key off childhood phobias (there are lots of scary teeth on view). At 10 minutes an episode, the show lends itself to marathon viewings.
The season two set features commentaries with creator Pendleton
Ward and his crew on every episode, which is great, except
apparently the Cartoon Network dissuade anyone from picking up this BD, as the film is still great and it’s the best version of it you’re likely to see anywhere (prints
on the revival circuit are mostly terrible), but it certainly warrants a revisit worthy of the film’s stature.

3)FemmeFatales:
The Complete
Second Season

EONE HOME VIDEO

Ever wonder what those 1940s
film noir movies would have been
like if the buzzkill Production Code
hadn’t existed? Well, clearly the
makers of Femme Fatales have,
resulting in this inventive homage
to those classic dark-hearted,
fatalistic black-and-white films
with the added bonus of Twilight
Zone-like twists
and some
deadly (and
very beautiful)
dames whose
machinations
leave nothing
to the imagination.
Loaded with bonus features
— ranging from audio commentaries
on every episode to deleted scenes and behind-the-scenes featurettes on several episodes
— this set includes all 12 second season installments, including an intriguing alternate cut of “Libra,” the series’ sexy superhero finale in which the titular character, played by a latex-clad Betsy Rue, seeks revenge against her vicious Russian crime boss father, played
by a delightfully scenery-chewing Ilia Volok. The season runs the gamut from the sinister college
shenanigans of “Extracurricular Activities,” starring a ballsy Vivica
A. Fox and a conniving Sandra McCoy; to “Trophy Wife,” a prime
piece of pulp fiction served raw with Chris Mulkey and Leilani Sarelle; to “Bad Science,” an
outlandish sci-fi episode in which deadly doppelgangers duke it out;
to the grind-house homage “Hell
Hath No Furies,” which is a total
hoot.

GRAND THEFT AUTO WAS ORIGINALLY ABOUT DINOSAURS

The Game You Know

When Grand Theft Auto 3 was
released in 2001, it didn’t merely change
the video game industry — it completely
reshaped it into its own image. Not just
in the whole “sandbox” and “murdering lots of prostitutes” thing, but
little things like stats counters: when GTA3 came out, the idea of a
“distance traveled by foot” in the “pause” screen seemed like an
insane novelty.

The Game We Almost Got

One word: “Dinosaurs.” According to a 2010 Gamepro article, the GTA
series was first conceived as a sim, when designer David Jones was
working at his start-up DMA design and came up with the top-down
view of the city. He wanted to create a game with a living, breathing
world, and when he asked himself what people would want to see in
that world the answer was, obviously, dinosaurs. He even got so far as
to design the city and populate it with the prehistoric beasts before
deciding that maybe kids these days were more into Hot Wheels
than Jurassic Park.