Mad Men: Season Two — Breaking Bad seems to have supplanted Mad Men as the most buzzworthy AMC original series, but this set collecting the second season of Matthew Weiner’s Emmy award-winning drama will no doubt whet the public appetite for the third-season premiere on August 16th. Delving deeper into the mysterious past of Madison Avenue exec Don Draper (Jon Hamm), the second season is decidedly darker than the first, and more uneven overall. Advancing the time-frame eighteen months to 1962, these episodes find Draper attempting to play the good family man and failing miserably, as he falls into an affair with a client’s wife and eventually retreats into his secret past life as Dick Whitman. At the Sterling Cooper ad agency, boss Roger Sterling (John Slattery) battles health issues, while copywriter Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss) attempts to crash through the glass ceiling. Although it sometimes plays like the latter seasons of The Sopranos with ad-campaign presentations in place of mob sit-downs (a subplot in which January Jones’ Betty Draper contemplates an affair of her own is particularly tiresome), Mad Men is one of the few current television dramas worth revisiting. This DVD edition is packed with extras, including audio commentaries on all thirteen episodes.
Grey Gardens — This fictionalized, made-for-HBO version of the classic Maysles Brothers documentary is not to be confused with the Tony award-winning Broadway musical derived from the same source material, but the story, about two eccentric relatives of Jacqueline Onassis living in squalor (played here by Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore), remains as bizarrely compelling as ever.
The Edge of Love — It sounds like a daytime soap from the ’70s, but the latest from British director John Maybury (The Jacket) is a biopic that takes the shape of a love triangle, starring Matthew Rhys as sodden poet Dylan Thomas, Sienna Miller as his unstable wife Caitlin, and Keira Knightley as his first love Vera.
For All Mankind — The good folks at Criterion have lovingly restored this 1989 documentary about the twenty-four men who went to the moon just in time for the fortieth anniversary of the first lunar landing. Director Al Reinart supplies a commentary that also features Apollo 17 commander Eugene A. Cernan, the last man to set foot on the moon. That we know of, anyway.
