The DVD of the week is definitely Mad Men. I know it’s a TV show—cable TV even—but it’s eons better than any new movie released on DVD for the Fourth of July weekend. That is unless you harbor some perverse affection for Owen Wilson’ roaringly unfunny Drillbit Taylor, the thrill-free Vantage Point, or misfires from Wong Kar Wai (My Blueberry Nights) and John Cusack (War, Inc.). Your time can be more excitingly spent with the first season of AMC’s Mad Men—all thirteen episodes collected in a smashing DVD package, the better to capture the look, sound and atmosphere of Manhattan’s Madison Avenue advertising world, circa 1960, where the show is set. If you haven’t seen Mad Men yet, get busy. The Emmy nominations, to be announced on July 17th, will surely be heaping praise upon it, to go along with the Peabody award and Golden Globes for Best Drama and star Jon Hamm. The DVD set is your best chance to play catch up. If you have seen Season One, a DVD refresher course will only reinforce the show’s quality and whet your appetite for Season Two which starts on July 27th with a stunning new episode that leaps ahead a bit in time. Here are five reasons why I think Mad Men is the best new drama series on television If you disagree, fire at will:

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George Carlin's death on Sunday at seventy one reminds me of how much scrappy fun it was to see him anywhere. Yes, that includes movies. Many of them bad movies. Many of them merrily mocked by Carlin himself. But in a DVD week that gives us such flabby newbies as 10,000 B.C., Definitely, Maybe, and The Spiderwick Chronicles, we could do worse than punch a few Carlin movies into our DVD players to see the man in action again and hear his distinctive, hypocrisy-shattering comic voice. I'm thinking now of 1989's Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure in which Carlin played Rufus, the guitar-jamming guru (if only the Love Guru had a fraction of his wit) who arrives from the future to help Alex Winter's Bill and Keanu Reeves' Ted. Read his first words and you can hear him saying them:

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Are they kidding with these DVD releases:

Fool's Gold, starring Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey in what still gets my vote as the worst romantic comedy of the year.

Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins, another career crusher for the once-funny Martin Lawrence.

So I Married An Axe Murderer, a special edition of the laugh-free1993 farce that has no other purpose except to prove that Mike Myers once made a movie as bad as The Love Guru.

My suggestion is that we all pay homage to Stan Winston, the special effects master who died on Sunday at 62, by grabbing a few DVDs that represent his best animatronic creations. You could start with the movies that won him his Oscars. That would be Aliens in 1986, Terminator 2: Judgment Day in 1992 and Jurassic Park in 1993. Winston's T-Rex in that blockbuster made movie history. But it might be more of a tribute to watch a Winston film on DVD that never won the attention it deserved.

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I know what you’re thinking: Does the Dirty Harry Collection released today on standard DVD and newfangled Blu-Ray include all five "Harry" movies or only four, thus sparing us The Dead Pool, the final chapter released in 1988? Well, to tell you the truth, in all the excitement, I’ve kind of lost track. But being as this is the "Ultimate Collection," remastered with a quality in image and sound that will blow your head clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya punk?” My answer is:

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On a dragass DVD week dominated by the drab and preachy The Great Debaters, the painfully unfunny Mad Money and the totally unwatchable Untraceable, Indy comes to the rescue. With the fourth installment—Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull—just nine days away from your local multiplex, the DVD gods have picked an ideal time to re-release the first three Indy chapters in spanking new editions. Director Steven Spielberg and producer George Lucas have done intros for each movie, there are new bonus features not included on the 2003 DVD package, and the images jump off the screen with Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound to goose them. But the big question before the May 22nd opening of Indy 4, is how to rank the first three. To refresh your memory:

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Even if today's DVD releases were major—they're not unless watching Paris Hilton struggle to look alive in The Hottie & the Nottie strikes you as the ultimate symbol of creative striving —the pick of the week would still be the Two-Disc Special Edition of I'm Not There. Look, I know you didn't see this visionary work from director Todd Haynes in theaters. Just consider the film's paltry $3,728,430 gross (Iron Man made more than that in it's first five minutes at the box office). So it's time to grab this DVD—splendiferous in sound and image—and let it work you over. Haynes puts the music and the myth of Bob Dylan before us and, get this, never once mentions the name of the mesmeric changeling at his film's center. There's no need: Cover versions of Dylan songs occupy the movie like angels and demons doing battle at an exorcism. Not content with just one actor to portray Dylan in the act of inventing himself, Haynes hired six and hit the mega-jackpot with

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DVD TO THE RESCUE: THE MIST

When The Mist opened last year I wasn't much impressed. The version of the movie on the Two-Disc Special Edition DVD is way better and I'll tell you why. Disc 2 presents the movie in black-and-white, the way director Frank Darabont originally intended it, like a 1950s horror flick. Listen to Darabont's intro on the disc and you'll learn that studio beancounters freaked out over the idea that the blood would not run red. Have these idiots never seen The Thing (1951) or Them! (1954) or Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)?

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Want a DVD worth arguing about this week? It's got to be I Am Legend. Until the woman and the kid show up in the final third and interrupt Will Smith and his dog Sam in the act of warding off the Darkseekers, I was hooked. And the image and sound on this disc are demonstration quality. This is one of Big Willie's career best performances, as he spends his days alone roaming a deserted Manhattan (gangbusters CGI) and looking for survivors of a virus that

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FIND OF THE WEEK: STATE OF PLAY

If you've been glued to the sex scandal involving New York Governor Eliot Spitzer (see photo) and a high-priced hooker who called him Client 9, this is the DVD for you. State of Play is actually not a movie, it's a doozie of a six-part, 2003 British miniseries involving a married minister (David Morrissey), the sexy assistant he's having it in on with and the reporter (once the MP's campaign manager) who's leading the media witch hunt on his hypocritical ass. Hollywood is quickly—I bet more quickly now—

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As the movie weekend nears with 10,000 B.C. and College Road Trip, the hardcore film enthusiast has only one defense: hunker down with the best of today's DVD releases until the shitstorm ends, hopefully sometime this year.

PICK OF THE WEEK: Into the Wild

I ask you: How did Sean Penn's magnificent odyssey into one young man's yearning heart fail to be Oscar nominated as Best Picture, Best Actor (Emile Hirsch), Best Adapted Screenplay (Penn), Best Director (Penn) and Best Score (for the songs of Eddie Vedder)? Did Academy voters not see the passion in what Penn worked nearly a decade to get on screen? Did they side with Robin Wright Penn in her split with the volatile Penn after eleven years of marriage? Or are they just blind, deaf and stupid? I have to go with the last reason.

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