New to Blu: In addition to the new releases, there are a handful of interesting titles hitting Blu-ray for the first time next week including Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn in John Huston’s The African Queen, Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo and Sanjuro plus Pixar’s Toy Story and Toy Story 2.
Available today: Pedro Almodovar’s Broken Embraces starring Penelope Cruz and Disney’s The Princess and the Frog. Available Saturday 3/20: The Twilight Saga: New Moon.
Pre-order: Oscar nominee Carey Mulligan in An Education, Robert Downey Jr. in Sherlock Holmes, Nicolas Cage in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, LiC favorite Summer Hours, Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones, Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Emily Blunt in the Oscar-winning costume drama The Young Victoria, Meryl Streep in It’s Complicated, LiC favorite from Japan Tokyo Sonata, Oscar nominee Woody Harrelson in The Messenger and more.
LiC Recommends: Recent LiC favorites now available on DVD.
Available March 23, 2010:
Fantastic Mr. Fox (**** 1/2). Boggis and Bunce and Bean. One fat, one short, one lean. These horrible crooks, so different in looks, were nonetheless equally mean. And so begins Fantastic Mr. Fox, Wes Anderson’s adaption of Roald Dahl’s classic children’s story about a fox bringing the farmers’ wrath down upon his friends and family all because a fox can’t help being a fox. It’s a clever, funny and surprisingly sweet little number that might play better to Anderson fans and the art house crowd than to the families and children it’s being marketed toward, but that’s what makes it a cut above the usual family movie slog. The lo-fi, Rankin-Bass style stop-motion animation takes a minute to warm up to compared to the sterile, too-perfect CGI you find everywhere else you look, but in the end it adds to the film’s abundant charm. It’s also a perfect outlet for the director’s typically detailed production design. As you’d expect from Anderson, Fox has a terrific soundtrack mixing Anderson’s flair for choosing pop tunes with Alexandre Desplat’s jaunty score and even a song or two by ex-Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker. Finally, bringing the whole thing to life, George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, Wallace Wolodarsky, Eric Anderson, Michael Gambon, Owen Wilson and Willem Dafoe lend their abundant voice talents.
(Opened: 11/13/09) Trailer / Review DVDBlu-rayRent
Following up last week’s announcement detailing the first half of the Tribeca Film Festival lineup, here’s another group of 40+ films from the Encounters, Discovery, Cinemania and Spotlight sections of the program.
In the Encounters section, Alex Gibney captures Lawrence Wright’s one-man play in the world premiere of My Trip To Al-Qaeda; Nip/Tuck producer/writer Richard Levine premieres Every Day starring Liev Schreiber, Helen Hunt, Brian Dennehy, Carla Gugino and others; Ellen Barkin and Famke Janssen star in the psychological thriller The Chameleon; Andy Serkis in the North American premiere of the Ian Drury story sex & drugs & rock & roll (previously announced I think); and the world premiere of Chuck Workman’s documentary about avant-garde cinema Visionaries.
The Spotlight section includes 8 films that have already made names for themselves at various festivals around the world, a number of which have turned up in the pages of Living in Cinema in the last 12 months or so. They include Robert Duvall in Get Low, Michael Winterbottom’s controversial The Killer Inside Me starring Casey Affleck, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Micmacs, Neil Jordan’s Ondine starring Colin Farrell, Nicole Holofcener’s Please Give and Fatih Akin’s Soul Kitchen.
Welcome back to the LiC Watercooler, your weekly opportunity to talk about anything and everything under the cinematic sun. Share your thoughts on whatever you’ve seen recently, be it in theaters, on DVD or on cable, or feel free to opine an anything you’ve come across in movie news in the last week.
Before I launch into assorted movie goings on, don’t forget to enter for a chance to win a hardback copy of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The film opens on Friday and winning the book couldn’t be an easier proposition.
Green Zone took a dump at the box office this weekend, but it didn’t have anything to do with the fact that it sucked, which it did. No, we’ll line up for any old slop as long as there’s no danger we’ll have to take account of ourselves. The truth is that Iraq is the kiss of box office death for any movie. We’re like dogs who crap on the carpet and then shrink away from having our noses rubbed in it. I suppose it serves Universal right for thinking they could turn the war into a $100 million action-suspense picture.
Of course Michael Moore loved it, but then he knows a thing or two about taking complex and controversial subjects and reducing them to simple entertainment. I doubt Universal will be quoting him on the DVD box.
You’ve read the reviews, you’ve seen the poster, now Apple has the trailer for Nicole Holofcener’s Please Give starring Catherine Keener, Oliver Platt, Amanda Peet and Rebecca Hall.
Amy Ryan: Jeez, Matt. With this underwritten part, I feel as out of place
in Green Zone as you look standing poolside in full combat gear.
Matt Damon: Seriously. You’ve got as much connection to
this movie as Judith Miller had to the truth about WMD.
I’m not sure which is more offensive: that Paul Greengrass has turned the Iraq WMD clusterfuck into a trite Hollywood conspiracy thriller or that he’s emasculated Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s book Imperial Life in the Emerald City until it’s little more than window dressing for the same. Whatever your politics or your feelings about the legitimacy of the war, reasonable questions remain about the selling of the invasion, its prosecution and its aftermath. Greengrass glides over all these complexities in favor of a cheap bit of fiction that manages only a few halfhearted jabs and lands them about four years too late.
Taxi Driver’s Paul Schrader – one of dozens of screenwriters who tell their Tales from the Script
“A writer friend of mine once described screenwriters as ‘egomaniacs with low self-esteem.’ ”
-Dennis Palumbo, Screenwriter (My Favorite Year)
Filmed in conjunction with the Peter Hanson’s book of the same name, Tales from the Script is a must-see for anyone who has ever wanted to write a screenplay or who is currently trying to. Comprised entirely of talking-head interviews interspersed with amusing (or depressing, depending on your perspective) clips of films that take jabs at the writing business, Script offers a unique writer’s-eye view of the process from blank page to Oscar acceptance speech. It’s an amusing, sage and at times bleak portrait of a livelihood everyone seems to think they can succeed at while few ever do.
Welcome to the unsettling world of an overprotective single mother and her only son Do-joon, a boyish, mentally challenged 27-year-old who spends his days goofing off and his nights drinking. When he is arrested and quickly convicted of the grisly murder of a schoolgirl, Mother will go to any length to find the real killer and to prove Do-joon’s innocence.
This is Bong Joon-ho’s psychological mystery thriller Mother, a film that plays dreamy surreality, black humor, suspense and sadness like instruments in a symphony of the filmmaker’s own design. Fusing the terrain and techniques of horror-suspense to a particularly twisted mother-son love story, Bong has made a film uniquely his own and one of the best of the young year so far.
The fine folks at Twitch have a clip of Bong Joon-ho’s Mother opening Friday. It’s a spoiler free bit showing “Mother” investigating the home of someone she believes to be the person behind a murder for which her son has been jailed. It’s only a small part of a longer scene (one of the better in the film) and it doesn’t mean too much out of context, but it gives you slice of what the film is about.
As always, if you’re already sold on the film, skip the clip. On the other hand, if you’re on the fence, by all means have a look.
Once in awhile, a movie flies right in under my radar and then turns up a few months out without my ever having noticed it before. So it is with James Ivory’s latest The City of Your Final Destination starring Anthony Hopkins, Laura Linney and Charlotte Gainsbourg – LiC favorites all.
Based on Peter Cameron’s 2002 novel, Destination tells the story of a young American academic who travels to Uruguay with the hope of convincing the family of a recently deceased author to allow an authorized biography. The author’s brother (Hopkins) thinks it’s a great idea, but the widow (Laura Linney) and the mistress (Gainsbourg) balk.
The City of Your Final Desitination opens April 16th in New York and April 23 in Los Angeles. I’ll be getting a look at it in the next few weeks and I’ll let you know if it’s worth a look.
Blu-ray
Rent
