Holiday DVD Watchlist

Years after the independent video rental market has all but dried up elsewhere, we’re very lucky here in [[Charlottetown]] to have That’s Entertainment — it’s a tour de force that makes renting from the multinationals feel like eating cardboard.

Last Sunday I stopped in to rent a menagerie of DVDs to tide us through the winter storms and holiday week; they’re due back tomorrow and we made it through almost everything (credit to my in-laws for putting up with the box-set marathons). Here’s what we’ve seen:

• Long Way Down is the television series about the motorcycle journey by actors Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman from John o’ Groats at the tip of Scotland to Cape Town at the tip of South Africa, a follow-on from their Long Way Round journey around the world. They’ve done a decent job of turning what could have otherwise been endless footage of motorcycles on dirt into compelling viewing, and they deserve credit for shining a light on Africa as a something other than an endless crisis. The soundtrack is particularly impressive.
• Ballykissanel Series 3 is twelve episodes of quirky Irish dramedy. It’s the season I’ve dreaded watching since I became a fan many years ago; suffice to say that episode 11 is a shocker. Perhaps an acquired taste, but if you manage to acquire it, you’ll find all six series at the Provincial Library as well as at That’s Entertainment.

• The Shop Around the Corner is a 1940 starring Jimmie Stewart and Margaret Sullavan. The film served as an inspiration for the 1998 You’ve Got Mail starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, and the broad themes of the two films are very similar. The Shop Around the Corner is set in Budapest, but although the names of the characters are Hungarian, the films entirely in English and might as well have been set in London or Chicago. Not a must-see movie, but well-acted and interesting nonetheless.