Video Picks & Passes

THE HAROLD LLOYD COMEDY COLLECTION: PICK

MARCH OF THE PENGUINS: PICK

(2005)

SKY HIGH: PICK

(2005)

For fans of silent comedy, it's the DVD event of the decade: Harold Lloyd, the “Third Genius” of silent comedy (Chaplin and Keaton being the other two), until now almost totally unavailable on DVD, at last enters the modern home-video age in grand style with The Harold Lloyd Comedy Collection. The three-volume, six-disc set (with a bonus disc available with the full set) features all the comedian's greatest and best-known films, and then some.

Finally, movie buffs who know Lloyd only from the famous image of the bespectacled star dangling perilously from the hands of a giant clock 12 stories above the streets of Los Angeles can enjoy Lloyd's entire nerve-wracking skyscraper climb in Safety Last!, found in Volume 1. Volume 2 features two of Lloyd's best films, college football spoof The Freshman and Lloyd's all-time masterpiece, The Kid Brother, a frontier thrill comedy with Lloyd pitted against his loutish older brothers, a bullying neighbor, and medicine-show hucksters. Volume 3 includes Speedy, Lloyd's last silent masterpiece, shot in various New York City locations and featuring a spectacular trolley-car chase scene and a cameo by Babe Ruth.

Lloyd's films make wonderful family viewing. Last night I watched Safety Last! with my three older kids, and they laughed hysterically throughout. They're also great fans of The Kid Brother, and enjoyed Grandma's Boy and a number of shorts available in a previous DVD edition. I'm looking forward to introducing them to Speedy, The Freshman and others in coming weeks.

New on DVD this week, March of the Penguins was the surprise hit of the summer, another French nature documentary in the tradition of — though not quite the same league as — Winged Migration, Microcosmos and Atlantis. Narrated by the ubiquitous Morgan Freeman, the crowd-pleasing film documents a year in the love life of emperor penguins. This involves a laborious cross-country trek, grueling endurance and a delicately timed sharing of incubation and chick-rearing duties in which any mistake can mean death.

Though frank about the harsh realities of penguin life (eggs roll onto the ice and freeze, chicks die, and a mother bird is eaten by a hungry seal), the film is a rewarding portrait of the tenacity of life in even the harshest conditions.

Also new this week is Disney's Sky High. Set in an airborne high school for the children of superheroes, the story blends two genres. It takes the now-familiar family-film premise of otherwise ordinary families inhabiting a world of colorful comic-book adventure (The Incredibles, Spy Kids) and weds it to the venerable clichés of the John Hughes-style high-school coming of age films today's parents grew up with.

It's hardly inspired, but it's competent, wholly inoffensive and mildly entertaining throughout. The fusion of the two sets of conventions manages to hold together for an hour and a half or so, and the film knows better than to outstay its welcome. Measured against the summer's other family fare, Sky High, starring Kurt Russell, registers somewhere between the superior March of the Penguins and the lackluster Herbie: Fully Loaded; it's neither as visionary nor as maddening as Tim Burton's schizophrenic, inspired/self-indulgent Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

CONTENT ADVISORY: This week's picks are all generally fine family viewing. Slapstick, action violence and mild menace are common in the films of The Harold Lloyd Comedy Collection, and occasionally a particular film may be less suitable for children than others. The March of the Penguins contains documentary frankness about the harsh realities of penguin life, and Sky High contains recurring stylized menace and romantic complications.