A roundup of the current best and rest on DVD. In this installment: Corpse Bride, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Gilmore Girls (Seasons 1+2).

Corpse Bride
Corpse Bride wails Tim Burton with every node of its malnourished being. Whether that’s reason enough to tear out the garden shears in a spasm of cause célèbre depends on how insatiable you are for a fix; Burton may insist on a kind of fable-like archaism here, but he sheds narrative pounds at the expense of falling into foppish, self-consuming Gothicism. Nevertheless, there’s a beauty to his excess, not in the least his evocation of Dickens' proletarian London: where as most milieu-whores bury their vision in grimy corporeality, Burton goes the other way, floating the city in an enamel purgatory. Left thumping at its middle are two hearts-in-a-cage, complete with matching forenames – Victor and Victoria - who contrive love in spite of their parents’ stiff-lipped, economically-wrought designs. Only things, it seems, simply aren’t meant to be for the pair of lovebirds: whilst out rehearsing ceremonial vows intended for Victoria, Victor unwittingly marries the Corpse Bride (gasp). His newly betrothed then leads him into the land of the dead, a puke-green gullet of neverending, expatriate-spun abandon that craps on the Victorian-cliché-melded-into-cliché of above. As the two worlds cross arms, Victor is thrown into relationship lockjaw, snuffing easy contrasts between love and necessity; by way, the very act of marriage falls under siege, revealed to be as ecstatic and inevitable as it is empty and ritualistic. Seductively curious stuff, but still... part of me really wants to believe this isn’t all just some elaborate joke about how English women are more frigid than the dead. New to DVD. (optional English subtitles; interviews, behind-the-scenes footage, production drawings; animators, Tim Burton, voice actors and puppets featurettes; pre-production galleries; isolated music track).—DL

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
If there’s any litmus test involved in this sort of giddy card-trick of a film, then those who can buy Val Kilmer as a lemony fag should have no problem with Robert Downey Jr. feeling out-of-joint at an LA coke soirée. You see, director Shane Black's is a world that begins in New York and ends in California, caroused by a stable of the most elegantly disdainful. What makes this more than stargazing a dead constellation, though, is the way the film remains acclimatised to the venomous anxiety that acts as an organising principle for – indeed – any social scene. The catalyst for this revelation is out-of-towner Harry (Downey),whose gushing lack of decorum fires like blank cartridges against LA’s scaly exterior, opening up lodged wounds by sheer brunt of annoyance. Not quite on par with Capracorn, a cool agreement is nevertheless struck between this geographical conflict of sincerity and cynicism (cf the entirety of Downey and Kilmer’s “Starsky and Butch” dynamic), and by the time Black reveals the full fervour of his dense, buzzing meta-tropolis (finally putting to positive fulfilment the maxim “it’s who you know”), you could almost forget you ever accused him of being a smug asshole. Because in Black-land, the incest line from Chinatown is less a site for hiccupy parody than a chance to mire it for a new shade of piteousness, and name-dropping ceases to be an empty show-card for models/actresses/air-hostesses everywhere, and instead becomes an actual instrument of connectivity. But it’s with fictional crime-author Johnny Gossamer that Black gets to have his cake and eat it too, superficially falling into the vertigo of Chandler’s avant-plotting, while simulatenously flashing the broken face of Hollywood’s dream factory. Every two-bit cad knows how to fuck over the house from the in, then make a run for it – the real hero turns up to work the next day. New to DVD. (optional English subtitles; no DVD extras)—DL

Gilmore Girls: The Complete First + Second Seasons
Stealthily feted as “the best show you’re not watching”, Gilmore Girls isn’t as underappreciated as you might think: critics fornicate over its wry, of-the-moment witticisms; the conservative lap up its wholesome small town Americana and robust family values; its fans are rabid and legion, if not quite all out of the closet yet. See, for me to admit to the Gilmores as one of the best shows over the last few years would be to cop somewhat of a ribbing: the title reeks of “chick flick”, while its lovelorn mother-daughter premise hardly puts my spread-legged manliness in good stead. But those who knock it clearly haven’t tried it. Currently in its sixth season, the show has made precarious moves of late: quaking a tectonic rift between the once inseparable Lorelai (the foxy 30-something mother) and Rory (the foxy late-teenage daughter), brought on by kiddo’s contentious decision to drop out of Yale. Rewind to the show’s first two seasons (the high school years), and you’ll discover the adhesive bond that makes these Girls so infectious – and, why driving a wedge between them threatens to estrange even the most ardent fan. Individually, Rory (Alexis Bledel) is the kind of young woman sorely missing on the box: smart, worldly, driven... basically the opposite of those Laguna Beach broads. Lorelai makes for a sly crossbreed of best friend, maternal dominatrix and universal MILF; she’s played with candor and dexterity by a killer Lauren Graham, possibly the funniest woman on TV. Full of wisecracks, eccentricities, and meta-pop cultural references (even for the encyclopedic, most will come as an obscure surprise), the show’s other great strength is its dialogue: locked, loaded and delivered at the rate of a gattling gun, this is some of the wittiest repartee you’ll find on television. New to DVD. (6-disc boxset; optional English subtitles; various behind-the-scenes featurettes; additional scenes; on-screen factoids; a film by Kirk; Gilmore-isms).—TW

» Text by David Levinson and Tim Wong.