Serial

List Price: $14.95 Buy For: $13.49
Usually ships in 24 hours


Add to Cart


Compare New & Used Prices From All Available Merchants:

Starring: Martin Mull
Rated: R (Restricted)
Type: DVD
Studio: Legend Films
Release Date: 2008-07-01
Harvey Holroyd (Martin Mull) is a Marin County resident who is surrounded by strangeness. His family, neighbors and co-workers all seem consumed by the fads and trends of 1980, and it's getting to be too much to take. Sex, drugs, psychobabble and health food - it's enough to drive anyone insane! Tuesday Weld, Christopher Lee and Tommy Smothers help make up a wacky all-star cast. Serial is a biting and hilarious satire of 1980 California life that seems eerily prophetic three decades later.

Serial offers satire of the 1970s as it was going on
Serial is a movie I have always loved. The jargon of the characters "space to grow", "I hear you", "peer group dynamics", Needing "space" and so on. Then there is the tone of the film: this is a tricky film because it makes fun of things that have taken on respectable forms today: the motivational/consciousness/psych industry as well as the excesses of the women's movement and cultural liberalism in general. New Age was just getting started then and today things like Integral and Omega institute and many of the fads from California are more respectable, so the film's decision to criticize aspects of them might strike today's viewer as provincial at best and politically reactionary at worst. On one level it is a t.v. styled comedy about a harried, beleaguered square guy not "in touch" with the cult-like fads that have overtaken his family. But as the film progresses the fads grow ever more sinister. Actor Peter Bonerz deserves mention here as the film's toxic guru. Serial is really comedy about human extremism in any form. Serial is that rarest of things: a loose, racy, adult comedy that takes seems to give some credit to a conservative view. While not a right wing film per se it points to many flaws and problems with cultural and identity liberalism in a way that refuses to be moralistic. Indeed the film is a brief against moralism, moral hypocrisy and purism. It seems to be saying that the indulgent narcissim of the affluent characters has usurped the original promise of progressive liberalism. The opening wedding ceremony with the absolute inanity of the couples' vows sets it all up. Yet how many couples today pretentiously create their own vows with similarly embarrasing results?
The acting by Tuesday Weld, Martin Mull, and Sally Kellerman is standard comedic acting, Bill Persky, the t.v. veteran, directs with a t.v. informed style. But Serial is a wonderfully mixed up workwith more questions than answers: is it saying liberal trends had become as dogmatic as the old conservatism? Are the allegedly "sexist" jokes and sympathy for mens' desire to just get some sexual attention from their wives and leave the talk about feelings points of view with which we should NOT, as Serial clearly does, sympathize? A rather daring work for its genre, all its formulaic aspects notwithstanding because Serial has a point of view. See Serial because it is dated and quite exotically remote and quaint, yet very much about the present.

Just like I remember it
I have been waiting for this film to go to DVD - and now its available. I have to agree that in this digital age, a little more "technology" could have been used when making the Master copy, or the lab did shoddy work. Content still great - and what a flashback.

Good, But Not As Good As I Remembered
The DVD is fine as tro the quality of the video, sound etc. I did not enjoy this movie as much as I originally did. It is still a funny tkae on the 60's CA lifestyles, and can be enjoyable if you have never seen it before.

Marin County Morons
This is a brilliant satire of Marin County, California residents and their obsessions with "New Age" nonsense; political correctness, weird sexual fads, "finding" one's self, religious cults, and ridiculous psycho-babble terminology. While this movie was made in 1980, its satire is still (sad to say) applicable in today's California.

Martin Mull, in his first starring role, plays the only seemingly sane person in his circle of friends (as his precocious young neighbor points out, "The sane man must appear to be mad in an insane world"). Mull's dry wit is perfectly in tune with a script that gives him lots of truly memorable comic lines ("Your name is just "woman"? How do you get your mail?").

Mull is joined in the cast by other 1980s-era stars like Sally Kellerman, Bill Macy, Tom Smothers, Peter Bonerz, and Christopher Lee. Don't miss this one!

Great Film - Poor video quality
SerialThis is one of my all time favorite movies; the perfect send up of pompous bay area dilatantes. I waited a long time for this film to come out on DVD; while the film is still as funny as I remembered it, the print quality is terrible.