Anyone who’s ever seen a Kevin Smith movie knows he isn’t a filmmaker whose work screams out for hi-def. From the beginning, with 1994’s Clerks, Smith’s been at his best when he’s forced to do more with less; he’s a director who’s more about heart than aesthetic, and that focus tends to create an emotional disconnect in his bigger-budget work. A triple-disc box of Kevin Smith Blu-rays, in other words, might seem like just about the most useless investment a person could make — popping Clerks, Chasing Amy, and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back into your Blu-ray player is a little like driving a Lamborghini to the grocery store: It’s a gross misapplication of technology.
To be certain, Miramax’s Kevin Smith 3-Movie Collection does feel like a pretty senseless cash grab on Disney’s part. For one thing, the studio has taken two of Smith’s finest films (Clerks and Chasing Amy) and bundled them along with one of his weakest (Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back); for another, of the three, only Chasing Amy contains an appreciable amount of new bonus content. But before you write it off completely, understand two things: One, these movies are all available separately, and two, the collection is available at a fairly steep discount. If you’re a Blu-ray owner and a Smith fan who somehow doesn’t own these movies yet, this box should be an instant purchase. If you do already own them, on the other hand, you’ve got some thinking to do. (more…)
You wouldn’t think a movie featuring a talking penis could be boring, but you’d be wrong. I have proof, and that proof is Sacha Baron Cohen’s Brüno.
Cohen proved himself a blazing pioneer of 21st century guerilla comedy with 2006’s Borat, in which he played a mustachioed, childlike misogynist who travels to America as a cultural ambassador from Kazakhstan, wandering the country with a camera crew as he insults women and Jews, stalks Pamela Anderson, and embarrasses unsuspecting bigots. It was a shocking, deeply offensive film — one that left you doubled over and gasping for air with laughter even as you intellectually recoiled from what was unfolding on the screen, and the kind of phenomenon that really can’t be repeated.
He had to try anyway, of course. It didn’t work, but you can’t fault him for the effort. (more…)
You know the scene. Hell, if you grew up in a certain era, it’s practically tattooed on your eyelids. Lloyd Dobler (deftly played by John Cusack) stands in the driveway of the home of his beloved, Diane Court (Ione Skye). It’s early morning. He has his boom box, and his Peter Gabriel cassette. He raises the boom box above his head …
To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the release of Cameron Crowe’s directorial debut, Say Anything…, Fox has released the film on Blu-ray. In addition to the film itself, the disc includes some worthwhile new bonus features including a revealing documentary that looks back at the film 20 years later, a conversation with Cameron Crowe, and even a trivia track that includes over 200 questions about the film. There’s also a cast commentary which was originally recorded for the DVD version, and alternate, deleted, and extended scenes.
Lloyd and Diane are classic high school outsiders. She’s brilliant, and beautiful, with a bright future in front of her that includes a fellowship that will take her to England to study. At the same time she’s lonely, and insecure. Her parents divorced five years earlier, and when given the choice, Diane opted to live with her father, brilliantly played by John Mahoney. Lloyd, who lives with his sister (played by his real life sister Joan Cusack), has no really discernible future, unless kickboxing, “the sport of the future,” catches on (which of course it did). But he’s an eternal optimist, and you have the sense that he’ll land on his feet no matter what happens. (more…)
Once upon a time, fashioning an action epic movie took more than just a big budget — it required some real imagination, not just to come up with the ideas for the storylines, but to figure out how to bring larger-than-life situations to life onscreen. The results were often laughable, but just as often, they introduced some real visual thrills and filmmaking innovations — stuff that really made you wonder how it was made. These days, all the world’s a digital playground, and although filmgoers can still be dazzled by CGI-fueled stuff like Roland Emmerich’s upcoming 2012 or James Cameron’s Avatar, we’re a lot more jaded now; as incredible as things can look, we know, in the back of our minds, that it was produced with more mouse-clicking than elbow grease. Action movies, in particular, seem to have devolved; technology definitely helped to a point, but they’re often built from such simple materials that anything that speeds up their journey to the screen feels like a net loss.
Not long ago, buying food was a much more involved process — people had relationships with their butchers and grocers, they had a sense of which foods were in season during different times of the year, and no one celebrated their birthday by going to On the Border and eating a burrito as big as their head. Thanks to a number of factors I won’t bore you with here (including anti-poverty initiatives, developments in food technology, and the ever-more-tangled American farm subsidies program), all that’s changed in the last 35 years; these days, for more than a few of us, getting food is as automatic and thoughtless as the folks who dreamed up The Jetsons imagined it would be. And one of the results, for far more than a few of us, is an obesity epidemic that has made tons of money for Bob Harper and Jillian Michaels, not to mention pharmaceutical companies, Big & Tall franchise owners, and funeral homes.
We’ve reached the point where, as a culture, we no longer have a real relationship with our food. We haphazardly react to the conflicting streams of data we receive — eggs are good for you! Eggs are bad for you! Holy shit, there’s e. coli in the spinach! Get whole grains in your Wonder Bread without sacrificing that gummy white flavor! — without really developing an understanding of what it means. But here’s the thing: Food really isn’t any more complicated than it’s ever been. And thanks to a number of authors, including Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) and Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food), people have slowly started to take a more active role in what they eat. But book sales being what they are, a movie about the ugly underbelly of agribusiness is probably a more effective educational tool. Enter Robert Kenner’s Food, Inc., which wowed critics during its limited theatrical run earlier this year, and reaches DVD and Blu-ray today. (more…)
As anyone who takes spirituality seriously knows, it’s only natural for a person to experience ebbs and flows in his relationship with whatever higher power he believes in. But what if your career was founded on that relationship? What if you were famous for it? And what if…it ended? Badly, even?
That’s the premise at the heart of writer/director John Hindman’s The Answer Man, which stars Jeff Daniels as Arlen Faber, a sort of cranky cross between Neale Donald Walsch and J.D. Salinger whose 20-year-old book, God & Me, became the kind of hit that enables an author to take the rest of his career off — which is a good thing, because even though God & Me was inspired by a supposedly personal connection with the Almighty, Faber doesn’t have another book in him; he hasn’t felt anything but anger toward God, and contempt for his fellow human beings, in many years. It’s really a pretty interesting idea for a movie, which is why it’s such a pisser that Hindman decided to turn it into a thuddingly obvious romantic comedy.
The Answer Man is the kind of movie that tells you almost everything you need to know — about its characters, about its various plot arcs, and about the likelihood of tripping over the movie on Lifetime six months from now — in its first 15 minutes. And even worse, it tells you even before it tells you: Watching Lauren Graham in her opening scenes as an overprotective mother who feeds her son soy bacon and plays classical music as she drops him off at school in her Saab, you just know she’s going to rev the engine and crank up some rock & roll as soon as the kid is in the building. And lo, she does. Hindman makes it clear from the beginning that he doesn’t trust his audience to draw its own conclusions, drawing with the kind of broad, dumb strokes you’d expect from a Matthew McConaughey movie. How do we know the struggling bookstore owner played by Thumbsucker’s Lou Taylor Pucci is an alcoholic? Because he tells us with his very first lines. So on and so forth. (more…)
During its brief lifespan, Blu-ray has been helped along by the usual early adopters, but now that the format has beaten out HD DVD for next-gen dominance, if it’s really going to assert itself as a genuine successor for DVD, it’ll have to appeal to the market that really matters. I’m talking about film buffs — the folks who feel the sting of shame every time a movie is given the deluxe reissue treatment because, even though they’ve already paid to own it on at least one format, they can’t help wanting to own it all over again. If you’re one of those people, you’ve hated yourself a little for owning more than one copy of Spinal Tap, or Terminator 2, or The Wizard of Oz — and now you can add North by Northwest to the list, because as part of its 50th birthday celebration, Warners is rolling out a newly remastered version of the Hitchcock classic to replace the one it released less than a decade ago.
And you know what? From where I’m sitting, it’s actually worth buying again — at least on Blu-ray, where Northwest is the first of Hitchcock’s films to receive the hi-def upgrade. Warner Bros., which has been busily schooling its competitors with lovingly assembled Blu-ray transfers for months, has come close to outdoing itself here; I think only its Wizard of Oz reissue is better, and that’s at least partly due to the fact that the Oz Blu-ray comes in a giant box with reams of bonus material and a watch my daughter is wearing right now. (more…)
In 2009, Land of the Lost was a crappy, overblown Will Ferrell movie that tanked at the box office, suffered the wrath of critics, and even earned a condemnation from the American Medical Association for daring to show Ferrell’s character holding a pipe — a case study in how to take $100 million and piss it away on all the wrong things. In a deeply ironic twist, the new Lost is twice as cheesy, half as entertaining, and infinitely more expensive than the old one. Gotta love Hollywood, right?
The show, for those of you who don’t remember, related the adventures of scientist Rick Marshall and his kids, Holly and Will, following their accidental deposit in a strange parallel dimension that almost (but not quite) resembled prehistoric Earth. Because the filmmakers were smart enough to realize that Will Ferrell needs at least a PG-13 rating to be the least bit funny — and because it isn’t a Ferrell film unless his gross, fumbling sexual advances are being inexplicably accepted by a woman far more attractive than he is — there are no kids here; instead, Ferrell’s Rick Marshall is joined by a fellow scientist named Holly (played by Anna Friel) and a hygienically deprived gift shop owner named Will (played by a clearly coasting Danny McBride). (more…)
Mention Jonathan Demme’s 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense (Palm Pictures), and a lot of people are likely to respond with a two-word summary — big suit. While David Byrne’s oversized suit is an effective and enduring image, he doesn’t don it until late in the show, and he doesn’t have it on for very long. Byrne accurately predicted that the big suit would make his head look small, but it’s a sideshow. The important matter is that Stop Making Sense is one of the finest concert films ever made, a nearly perfect blend of musical innovation, passionate performance, and cinematic brilliance.
It begins with an empty stage. Enter David Byrne with his acoustic guitar and boom box. Byrne treats us to a solo version of “Psycho Killer” that has all the dementia and danger you want out of that particular song. While Byrne is playing, Tina Weymouth’s bass riser is rolled on, followed by Weymouth herself, joining Byrne for “Heaven.” So it continues until all the core members of Talking Heads, including drummer Chris Frantz, and guitarist/keyboard player Jerry Harrison are present. The band is augmented by guitarist Alex Weir (of the Brothers Johnson), keyboard player Bernie Worrell (Parliament Funkadelic), percussionist Steve Scales, and backup vocalist Lynn Mabry (Brides of Funkenstein), and Edna Holt. Once everyone has arrived on stage, the full band blasts through a torrid version of “Burning Down the House.” (more…)
Synopsis:A poor little boy wins a ticket to visit the inside of a mysterious and magical chocolate factory. When he experiences the wonders inside the factory, the boy discovers that the entire visit is a test of his character.
A movie about a wild-eyed reclusive madman who sends the entire world into a candy-scrabbling frenzy as part of an elaborate mindfuck culminating in the transfer of his candy empire to a child, 1971’s Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory is one of the odder “children’s” movies ever made, and one whose survival as a cult favorite was largely dependent on Gene Wilder’s tremendous work in the title role, as well as the movie’s natural appeal to the type of weirdos who grow up to be film directors (see: Burton, Tim). Willy Wonka wasn’t terribly successful when it was released, least of all among parents who questioned its dark overtones and smattering of scary moments (just ask poor Spike Jonze about those folks), but it’s become accepted as a sort of minor classic over the years, particularly since Burton fumbled his Johnny Depp-led Wonka remake a few years ago. (more…)
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Anyone who’s ever seen a Kevin Smith movie knows he isn’t a filmmaker whose work screams out for hi-def. From the beginning, with 1994’s Clerks, Smith’s been at his best when he’s forced to do more with less; he’s a director who’s more about heart than aesthetic, and that focus tends to create an emotional disconnect in his bigger-budget work. A triple-disc box of Kevin Smith Blu-rays, in other words, might seem like just about the most useless investment a person could make — popping Clerks, Chasing Amy, and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back into your Blu-ray player is a little like driving a Lamborghini to the grocery store: It’s a gross misapplication of technology.![51VwAoltfsL._SCLZZZZZZZ_[1]](http://popdose.com/wp-content/uploads/51VwAoltfsL._SCLZZZZZZZ_1.jpg "51VwAoltfsL._SCLZZZZZZZ_[1]")
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You know the scene. Hell, if you grew up in a certain era, it’s practically tattooed on your eyelids. Lloyd Dobler (deftly played by John Cusack) stands in the driveway of the home of his beloved, Diane Court (Ione Skye). It’s early morning. He has his boom box, and his Peter Gabriel cassette. He raises the boom box above his head …![51LqDGIE6FL._SCLZZZZZZZ_[1]](http://popdose.com/wp-content/uploads/51LqDGIE6FL._SCLZZZZZZZ_1.jpg "51LqDGIE6FL._SCLZZZZZZZ_[1]")
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