DVD Corner

“Desperate Housewives: The Complete First Season”: Desperate? You could say that. But if it were just desperation that drove the women of Wisteria Lane, “Desperate Housewives” would have been just another soap opera and not the hit ABC television show it became. What made this Emmy Award-winning show one of the more satisfying pop-culture enfant terribles is how its desperation manifested itself. Here, we get repeat doses of blackmail, backbiting, infidelity, suicide, sex, gossip and relentless status-seeking. It’s marvelous, escapist fun. Wisteria Lane and the “ladies” who lunch there is a place where friendship and neighborly love don’t exactly go down like spoonfuls of sugar. Saccharine, yes – but rarely sugar, and don’t expect much of it to be sweet when so much of it is laced with bitters. The series, which stars Teri Hatcher, Brenda Strong, Marcia Cross, Eva Longoria, Felicity Huffman and Nicollette Sheridan in a fun return as everyone’s favorite town tramp, is just as salacious as you expect – throughout, there are more pool boys and plumbers sowing their wild oats than in any video coming out of the adult film industry. This new compilation comes on the heels of Huffman’s recent Emmy win, and it includes all 23 episodes, with some of the extras proving particularly worthwhile, such as the requisite bloopers segment that dashes rumors of tension on the set and a multilanguage featurette that involves a dinner party thrown by one very busy Bree (Cross). Grade: B+

“Robots”: A bucket of bolts, with audiences getting screwed. This computer-animated headache from Chris Wedge and Carlos Saldanha begins with the hopeful young robot Rodney Copperbottom (voice of Ewan McGregor) leaving his quaint hometown of Rivet to become an inventor in Robot City, a sprawling metropolis that makes Manhattan look like prairie land. The hand-me-down son of a robot dishwasher, Rodney has something to prove, all right, but the good news is that he has the goods to backup his dreams. He’s a talented visionary who wants to become as great an inventor as his idol, Big Weld (Mel Brooks). But with the evil Ratchet (Greg Kinnear) undermining all at every turn, Rodney finds himself in a pinch. Ratchet plans to rid the world of old robots made of spare parts, which includes Rodney, his family, Rodney’s friends, and millions of others ‘bots. What to do? The movie pushes the screen to its limits in its effort to find out. In an animated film, anything is possible. Do it right and a film about two damp dishrags headed straight for the wringer could be the main squeeze of the year – so long as there is a spark between them, a personality within them, a compelling story behind them. The tricky thing about today’s computer-animated movies is that the temptation is always there to push the terabyte into overload. There are obvious dangers to that. If a director is too seduced by the visuals to focus on what really matters – the characters, their relationships, the stories that bind them – the film’s soul can be lost. That was the case in last year’s “The Polar Express” and it’s also the case in “Robots,” a technically fine-looking yet dull-as-drill-bits movie whose busy animation creates 90 minutes of chaos onscreen. There isn’t a moment here when the dense visuals aren’t overwhelming the already thin story, which struggles to mine an identity of its own. Watching “Robots” is akin to watching someone else play a video game – for awhile, you’re enchanted by the graphics, but once the weak gameplay reveals itself, all interest is lost. Rated PG. Grade: C-