A bit of an odd release, this.  It’s not, in fact, a feature-length movie, but rather two episodes of the short-lived Robert Altman-produced TV series “Gun,” which ran a mere 6 episodes in 1997.  Even odder, it’s not even the first two episodes, but rather the third and fourth, and it’s being hyped on the box as “Starring James Gandolfini of ‘The Sopranos’” with no mention of Altman at all.  And it’s being released by the new “mainstream” arm of Full Moon Entertainment, the folks behind the Puppet Master movies.  The more I follow the video industry, the less I understand it.

    For those that weren’t paying attention during the month of “Gun”’s original airing, the series was an anthology that followed the adventures of the title object.  Each episode featured an entirely different cast, and had a totally new story centered around a gun.  Interesting idea, and one that probably wouldn’t have caught on even if the network hadn’t given it a doomed Saturday night slot.

    The first episode starts off with the assassin of a Turkish diplomat ditching his gun in an airport waste bin.  The gun is picked up by a janitor (Tom Wright), who sells it to a security guard (Gandolfini) worried about his wife’s protection.  It’s actually a good thing that his wife (Rosanna Arquette) gets a weapon, as she spends most of her days at home being spied on from across the alley by creepy writer Peter Horton.

    Horton meets up with her one day in the laundry room, and the two begin an affair.  Meanwhile, the assassin works his way towards Gandolfini in an attempt to get the evidence back.  Twists follow.

    It’s clever and well-acted, and really the perfect length for this kind of story.  Sure, Horton’s character veers unevenly between creepy and likable and some scenes, especially a great moment where Arquette enters Horton’s apartment as “Everybody Knows” plays effectively in the background, could have been expended, but it’s not bad.  It’s clever without being totally engaging.

    The second episode, the Altman-directed “All the Presidents Women,” is exactly the opposite.  It’s not nearly as clever as it thinks it is, but the cast is so much fun to watch that it won’t matter if the thing never quite comes together.

    First off, the plot is reliant on Randy Quaid being pretty much irresistible to women.  He’s the new president of the country club, you see, and the chicks are all over him.  The gun owned by the previous president shows up in the mail of his lover (Jennifer Tilly), the clip is delivered to his wife (Daryl Hannah) and the bullets go to an old flame (Sean Young).  Throw in his lover’s mother (Sally Kellerman) and an assorted batch of other loose country club ladies, and you’ve got a pretty typical black comic revenge story.

    But in Altman’s hands it becomes more than that.  Everyone seems to be enjoying themselves, and the Southern atmosphere of the thing works well to give it a sultry comic tone.  Proper personality quirks and little bits like Hannah’s spouting of random Presidential trivia and an episode involving the Clapper make it all very enjoyable.  It feels a bit like a warm-up for Cookie’s Fortune, and has much of that film’s charm.

    Quaid isn’t a particularly believable ladies’ man, though, in fact his character is a bit too stupid to have believably been fooling his wife all these years.  Still, the dialogue is crisp and quick and it’s hard to dislike something with lines like “I’m gonna show how the cow chews cabbage!” delivered by Jennifer Tilly.

    So one segment is clever-but-not-great and the other enjoyable-but-not-clever.   Neither are more than interesting footnotes to Altman’s career, though.  Fair trade-off, then.  But why isn’t this released, say, like a normal TV series, sell-through priced, in the order it was aired?  Answers to the usual address.