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French & Saunders: Living in a Material World Review: Like Absolutely Fabulous, the hit comedy it spawned and later was eclipsed by, French & Saunders can be maddeningly uneven. American viewers who missed the original BBC shows can enjoy many of their best moments on the collections French & Saunders: At the Movies and French & Saunders: Gentlemen Prefer; this additional compendium includes some choice material but comes off too scattershot to satisfy fully. Some of the best and the worst bits are movie and TV parodies. Julie Brown's Medusa: Dare to Be Truthful mocked Madonna's Truth or Dare far more effectively than Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders manage here; the Batman and Braveheart spoofs prove likewise lackluster. However, a pitch-perfect Baywatch send-up nails everything from body-image issues to cheesy aquatic special effects, while Jane Seymour and company get a deserved spanking for the homespun hokum of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. The sketches that ignore pop culture in favor of original characters likewise prove priceless, especially the piece in which a pair of spinsters plan their joint wedding and the one in which an old-school ambassador's wife gets a lesson in the decline of the British Empire. Not all of the humor survives the trip across the Atlantic -- not just British celebrity references, but British temperament, too. For anglophiles and Britcom aficionados, however, French & Saunders: Living in a Material World offers enough laughs to justify the investment of 90 minutes. Brian J. Dillard, All Movie Guide

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