Weekend: DVD: Two good 'Shots'

DVD: Two good 'Shots'

By STEVE PERSALL, Times Film Critic

Hot Shots! and Hot Shots! Part Deux

To be honest, the most noteworthy DVD release this week is The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, especially the upcoming four-disc Platinum Series Extended Edition Collector's Gift Set that might take as long to get through as J.R.R. Tolkien's epic novel.

New Line Home Entertainment wouldn't provide advance copies of Peter Jackson's Oscar-nominated fantasy in an effort to control video piracy. Those advance copies can be duplicated or posted on the Internet, effectively cutting into sales and rentals. (Like that didn't happen after Tuesday's official release.)

So, we'll plan to review The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring in the next issue of Weekend.

Competing home video distributors have conceded this week to Frodo, Bilbo and Gandalf. This week's lineup is a skimpy collection of dismissed theatrical releases (Deuces Wild, Chelsea Walls, The Business of Strangers) and first-time DVD versions of somebody's old favorites (Clash of the Titans, Time After Time, Wolfen). Most of them don't even include bonus features beyond a preview trailer and, maybe, a typical filmmaker commentary.

We'll settle for the one-two punch of Hot Shots! and Hot Shots! Part Deux, two of the best movie parodies to emerge from the post-Airplane! wave of silliness. Charlie Sheen is a stone-faced hoot as Topper Harley, a Top Gun-style flyboy in the first film, then a Rambo-esque savior of war prisoners in the sequel. The jokes come at supersonic speed, making your pause button a necessary tool so you can finish laughing at one bit before moving on to the next.

Bonus features are scarce but amusing. Both discs include theatrical preview trailers and 30-minute behind-the-scenes featurettes. But it's the tone of those making-of documentaries that makes a difference. The Hot Shots! featurette is titled "The Making of an Important Movie," with creators Jim Abrahams and Pat Proft joined by cast members in discussing the film as a Citizen Kane-style milestone. The sequel's documentary has the slightly more modest title "An Adventure in Filmmaking" with a Spanish-speaking narrator who makes a viewer check to see if the proper language option was selected. Just one more dumb touch for a couple of movies crammed with them.