DVDs: The Bare Necessities

News that Playboy magazine is celebrating its golden anniversary this year should come as no surprise to Las Vegans who pay even passing attention to billboards, new slot machines, signage on taxicabs, or what's happening at the Palms. Clearly though, while reaching such a milestone may be an excellent excuse for a party and a face-lift, maintaining a youthful appearance is a full-time job.

Much already has been written about the 50-year-old magazine's lifting of personnel and editorial concepts from such wet-behind-the-ears, peek-aboo mags as Maxim, Details, FHM and Stuff, in an effort to appear youthful and hip. How this strategy will play out is anyone's guess, as competition from skin merchants on the Internet is relentless. When it comes to strictly soft-core excitement, though, the magazine's most formidable threat is homegrown. Last year, Playboy Enterprises's entertainment division—responsible for producing cable, video and DVD programming—turned a profit of $32.4 million, compared to $2.7 million by the publishing division.

The magazine may be scrambling to stay in the spotlight, but under the methodical control of Hef's daughter, Christie, Playboy Enterprises has become the synergistic envy of the media world. In a sense, the magazine has begun to act as a "loss leader," whose primary function is to promote the kind of pictorial content that steers customers to Playboystore.com and the CyberClub. This is where subscribers can survey Playboy's inventory of branded products—including dozens of DVD titles—and learn more about the company's cable-television and satellite-radio services, and Internet sports book.

A quick perusal of recent video releases provides all the proof you need of the company's embracing of cultural, economic and physical diversity, and a shift from its reliance on Barbie-and-Ken-in-heat models. In addition to such predictable pictorial spinoffs as 2004 Playboy Video Playmate Calendar and Women of Starbucks, the bunny logo now appears on DVDs not necessarily produced in-house. The steamy instructional package, For Couples Only, retains the glossy Playboy sheen, but not such independently made features as Thrust: Drive Fast, Race Hard and Secret Cellar, which exploit the street-racing and horror genres, and lines exploiting the voyeur, Girls Gone Wild and other niche markets. Nothing original, just competently made knockoffs of tried-and-true fetish product.

Not having reviewed many Playboy titles in the last couple of years, I was surprised at the less-than-polished—OK, sleazy—look of both the models and photography showcased in Freestylin' Babes and Adult Stars: Close-Up, Kinky, in Playboy Exposed and Playboy TV lines. While it's great to see Playboy straying from its traditional insistence on girl-next-door good looks—as if all of our neighbors resembled Pamela Anderson and Suzanne Somers—but many of these women (few men, thank God) wouldn't have looked out of place on Springer.

In true Playboy tradition, though, these raunchy DVDs never cross the line into XXX. They are pretty much the video equivalent of a lap dance, the kind of straight-to-cable/video stuff that straddles the line between Cinemax and the Spice Channel. Nevertheless, you still won't find even the classier Playboy titles in the local Blockbuster, and naturally, a visit to the company's websites will open the doors to all sorts of other products and deals. Genius.

One sure way to get your foot in the door of a Hollywood executive is to be related to someone who's helped raise the studio's bottom line. Failing that, a resume full of music videos that have made MTV's heavy-rotation list also can work miracles. If any further evidence of this were needed, Palm Pictures now gives us the collaborative Directors Label series, which features music videos, shorts, commercials, interviews and other special features from innovative artists working outside the Hollywood mainstream. The first entries in the catalogue are The Work of Director Spike Jonze, The Work of Director Chris Cunningham and The Work of Director Michel Gondry. The packages are as generously conceived as they are entertaining to watch.

We're entering the end stretch of the 2003 movie calendar, and I've yet to find five movies more entertaining than Pixar/Disney's enchanting Finding Nemo. Animated features rarely get nominated for Best Picture—they have their own category now, after all—so I doubt it will make the cut this year. Nonetheless, it's terrific. The two-disc package overflows with fascinating behind-the-scenes material, deleted scenes and sidebar features. For me, as a lifelong aquarium hobbyist, the best part of Finding Nemo was Pixar's dead-on re-creation of an underwater environment. This marvel of cutting-edge digital animation is so convincing that, upon its theatrical release, some viewers actually complained of seasickness.

While Pixar's movies appeal naturally to audiences of all ages, veteran animator Ralph Bakshi has made a career attempting to create feature-length cartoons that cater specifically to adults. Fritz the Cat, Heavy Traffic, Wizards and Lord of the Rings maintain a devoted cult following, but his hipster-chic Cool World—which placed animated characters next to humans in a real-world environment—paled in comparison to Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The story involves an ex-con (Gabriel Byrne), who, while in prison, created a cartoon series featuring the voluptuous Holli Would (voiced by Kim Basinger). She seduces the cartoonist and pulls him into the world he created for her: a fantasy postwar Las Vegas where a hard-boiled detective (Brad Pitt) is the only human. It's a mess, to be sure, but more interesting than most of the stuff released by Hollywood today.