Bored by the same old selections on the shelves of your local video store or on that cable on-demand line-up? Searching for thrilling cinematic expeditions that can’t be found elsewhere? Look no further than right here. The following is my recommended cable viewing list for May 2008, of films unavailable on video – and it marks an unusual month, with the broadcast appearance of a fascinating Michael Powell film forgotten for forty years, a deeply moving and heartfelt documentary by a twentysomething tyro that checks in as one of the top three or four nonfiction films of the past decade, and oh, so much more. So as always: keep your remote handy and fire up your glitter box. We’re going channel surfing.

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27 Dresses: Grab your bon bons, invite your best girlfriend, and fire up the DVD player.

Diving Bell and the Butterfly: Find your direct neural interface, use it to call your favorite quadriplegic, and settle in for the night.

The Golden Compass: Fire up your atheistic commentary on the societal pressures against discovering one’s true identity, mount your armor plated polar bear, and cuddle up on the couch.

How She Move: Arbitrarily disregard your English syntax, talk like a lolcat, and bust a move.

Also on DVD this week: King Corn, Nanking, and Moondance Alexander.

It would be hard for any sequel to live up to the precedent set by what turned out to be one of the best stoner comedies ever made, but Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay is thankfully, as funny as the original. It’s just as raunchy and wild — extolling the virtues of weed and female genitalia at every opportunity — but where the first one largely concerned itself with the message of slackerdome, this one is surprisingly subversive, taking unexpected shots at the hypocritical political establishment and the ignorance that perpetuates both sides of the culture wars.

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Back in the late 1980s, when critics were fawning over Peter Weir’s overbaked, cloying and obnoxious Dead Poets Society (1989), few acknowledged that a little movie of two years prior (with a tiny fraction of its gross – it earned just over one million stateside, compared to Poets’ reported domestic gross of over 95 million) blithely achieved what Weir was attempting on a thematic level. And it did so with twice the grace and no manipulation at hand. Scottish darling Bill Forsyth’s Housekeeping (1987) was a product of onetime Columbia prexy David Puttnam’s brief, controversial tenure at that studio; Puttnam and Forsyth had worked together several years prior by collaborating on the masterful Local Hero (1983) at Goldcrest Films in the UK, so when the Coca Cola company purchased Columbia and brought Puttnam in to head-up their flagging studio operation (c. 1986), Puttnam turned to Europe for talent. Forsyth soon heeded Puttnam’s call and found himself whisked off to the lights of Los Angeles. The movie that the two men produced, Housekeeping (originally a property held by Cannon and slated to star Diane Keaton), is arguably the finest product of the Puttnam era at Columbia Pictures. Still, over twenty years later, few American viewers have heard of it; it has never received a DVD release, seldom turns up on cable, and is just awaiting rediscovery by cinephiles.

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Stories about young men unable to get over the girl who left them are as old as movies themselves. What sets Forgetting Sarah Marshall apart from the pack are the flesh and blood characters. For a first time screenwriter, Jason Segel aptly demonstrates a deep understanding of a cardinal rule in writing that everybody is flawed – capturing this in both his script, and in his performance as the severely heartbroken Peter. The movie expertly plays with stereotypes about aw-shucks good guys, horny superstars, and seemingly perfect new lovers, but it also pushes deeper into where those clichés come from. A savvy observer of human behavior, Segel treats his characters with empathy and compassion. He distills why specific romantic relationships happen, why they go on too long, and why they sometimes don’t happen when they should. Had he wanted to dig a few layers deeper, Segel could have crafted a serious story about the inability of twentysomethings to commit – the evidence suggests if he wants to try he might have a great drama in him. Thankfully, he has just as much skill as a gag writer, allowing him to wring more laughs than tears out of the pain.

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The duo at the center of Baby Mama - Tina Fey, as a corporate climber with a loudly ticking biological clock, and Amy Poehler, as the uneducated slob hired to be her surrogate mom — are to comedy what Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers were to dancing. They trust each other, and they know each other’s rhythms so well they can trade off who gets to be the straight man and who gets to deliver the laugh lines. If the film were just the two of them, it would be worth recommending, but writer/director Michael McCullers likes to share the comedic wealth - he knows that giving the supporting characters good lines pays great rewards.

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The producers of the oddball Finnish “Star Trek” fan film “Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning” are back, and this time they’ve cooked up something truly original.

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Dark Sky Films has just released a new edition of Jim VanBebber’s violent cult classic Deadbeat at Dawn as part of their truly impressive four disc “Visions of Hell” DVD box-set (which also includes the unrated, two-disc special edition of VanBebber’s transgressive shocker The Manson Family), but those who still own the original Synapse release of Deadbeat at Dawn may not want to toss that old disc up on eBay just yet!

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