Every so often, a movie comes into theaters with at least one big target on its back, and then it surprises the naysayers by actually being entertaining and worthwhile. Certainly Titanic couldn't have had worse buzz, between its scheduling and budget difficulties and the easy jokes that could be made from its title, only to wind up being one of the biggest grossers of all time. Going the Distance (new on DVD from Warner Home Video) is no Titanic, granted, but this charming and funny little movie is nonetheless quite the surprise, all things considered.
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Like most Americans, I didn't actually see the action-comedy-romance Knight & Day (out on DVD this week from Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment) in theaters, but I never would have predicted that the teaming of Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz would have led to one of the summer's highest-profile box office bombs. (Vanilla Sky notwithstanding.) But if pairing two popular movie stars were a guarantee of success, you'd see a lot more one-from-Column-A casting in Hollywood. Here's a look at some other sure-fire pairings that wound up being anything but:
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'Tis the season to begin complaining about spending time with one's family during the holidays. (If anyone reading this is related to me -- I'm not talking about you. Honest.) But as with all things, surviving Thanksgiving dinner with the relatives is really just a matter of perspective. So if Aunt Barb starts acting inappropriately after too much Franzia, and your Tea Party-ing cousin wants to show you irrefutable proof that the president is actually a Seventh-Day Adventist from Mars, just remind yourself how lucky you are not to be spending Turkey Day with these movie families:
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Sylvester Stallone shrewdly put together an all-star team of '80s action stars as the main gimmick behind this year's The Expendables (out this week on DVD from Lionsgate), but while it's nice that the movie gave the likes of Dolph Lundgren the chance to be in a film that played in U.S. theaters before going to home video, what about the unsung leading ladies of the Reagan years? Here's hoping some enterprising filmmaker can come up with a way to get these '80s ladies back on the big screen.
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If you were worried about the fate of young actor Noah Ringer, who starred in M. Night Shymalan's cruddy The Last Airbender (out on DVD this week from Paramount Home Entertainment), fear not -- he's already landed a plum role in Jon Favreau's eagerly anticipated Cowboys & Aliens. Which makes Ringer the latest in a long line of child stars who managed to keep their careers afloat after appearing in a legendary stinker. Ahead, check out five other child star survivors.
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Fritz Lang's sci-fi masterpiece gets a snappy new DVD release with The Complete Metropolis (new from Kino International this week), including long-lost footage that recently surfaced thanks to a 16mm print found in an Argentine vault. Sadly, the fact that it's a silent movie will cause lots of otherwise-adventurous moviewatchers to turn up their nose at it, like it was a spoonful of cod-liver oil being administered by Kate Gosselin. But even if repeated film-class screenings of Intolerance made you think that all pre-sound movies were tedious and overacted, a look at Metropolis -- or any of the following films -- should convince you otherwise.
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Oscar night, 2000: Despite overwhelming acclaim for her turn as an embittered, adulterous realtor in American Beauty, an exceedingly pregnant Annette Bening loses the Academy Award for Best Actress to relative newcomer Hilary Swank, who plays martyred transgender teen Brandon Teena in the powerful drama Boys Don't Cry. Oscar night, 2005: Despite overwhelming acclaim for her turn as an aging stage star in Being Julia, Annette Bening loses the Academy Award for Best Actress to Oscar-winner Hilary Swank, who plays a martyred butch boxer in the powerful drama Million Dollar Baby. What will Oscar night, 2011 bring?
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My iTunes has been telling me all week that today was going to change my life -- but the news that the Beatles catalog is now available via Apple's music service didn't even change my "A Day in the Life," since like most Beatles fans, I had already picked up the CD reissues of recent years. And while the Beatles have their own distinguished filmography -- from the influential A Hard Day's Night to the larky Help! to the elegiac Let It Be -- the Fab Four have made enough of a pop culture impact to spawn movies about them that they weren't even involved in. Ahead, five Beatles movies without The Beatles.
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For those of us who thought Robert Zemeckis' Beowulf was a vast improvement over The Polar Express, A Christmas Carol (out this week from Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment) wound up being a disappointing return to the rubbery, dead-eyed characters of that earlier Christmas flick. But at least give Jim Carrey points for trying -- he provides the license-to-ham role of Ebenezer Scrooge with his full arsenal of grimaces and twitches and, if nothing else, totally pours himself into the character. (He's a little less successful playing all the ghosts, but none of his doubling comes close to the creepiness of seeing Gary Oldman play Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim.)
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So the "legendary" original version of Ocean's 11 (Warner Home Video) makes its Blu-Ray debut this week in conjunction with the film's 50th anniversary. The idea of Ocean's 11 -- the Rat Pack hipsters swinging their way through a cuckoo heist in Vegas, baby -- contains lots of promise, but the movie itself is kind of a snooze. (Which is why it was the perfect movie for Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney to remake; why people insist on trying to remake good movies remains a mystery.) Still, the Rat Pack has an enduring cinematic legacy, although they were more likely to shine on their own than as a collective. Ahead, Movieline offers you a quick look at the best and worst that Frank, Sammy and Dean offered to movie history.
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The thought that anyone is dying to sit through Lars von Trier's irritating art-wank Antichrist (now available from The Criterion Collection) for a second time, much less in Blu-Ray, frankly boggles the mind. But its portrait of a terribly dysfunctional couple -- Willem Dafoe becomes therapist for wife Charlotte Gainsbourg after their infant crawls out the window and dies while mommy and daddy were boinking, leading to Gainsbourg's eventual torture of Dafoe out in the woods -- calls to mind other movies about the Worst. Couples. Ever. Ahead, five pairs that wouldn't be welcome guests at a weekend dinner party.
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This week, Shout! Factory releases Mystery Science Theater 3000 Vol. XIX (yes, that's 19), featuring four more classic episodes from the show that made it OK to talk back to the screen: Devil Doll, Devil Fish, Ed Wood's Bride of the Monster, and Phil Tucker's infamous Robot Monster. A writer for most of the show's run, Mary Jo Pehl (who played the evil Mrs. Forrester during the SyFy run of MST3K), sat down to talk about her history with the cult cable classic as well as her current movie-riffing project Cinematic Titanic, which teams her with MST3K creator Joel Hodgson and fellow show vets Trace Beaulieu, Frank Conniff, and J. Elvis Weinstein on live shows and DVD releases.
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Because of actress Jill Clayburgh's ongoing battle with lymphatic cancer -- which she sadly lost over the weekend at age 66 -- she worked much less in recent years, popping up occasionally in film (Running with Scissors) and TV projects (Dirty Sexy Money). As such, anyone under 30 probably doesn't remember the impact she had in American film during the 1970s and '80s. With that in mind, allow Movieline to remind you with these five classic Clayburgh performances available on DVD.
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As arbitrary here's-a-bunch-of-movies-this-studio-owns-on-DVD box sets go, The Cher Collection (Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment) at least provides something of a career retrospective of the star's film presence from kitschy hippie (Good Times, Chastity) to Serious Actress (Silkwood, Moonstruck) to marquee diva (Mermaids, Tea with Mussolini). But one box set can barely cover the extraordinary breadth of Cher's contributions to pop culture - hell, not even the medium of cinema can begin to do justice to the many corners of the zeitgeist where she's had an impact. So in honor of this new DVD set, here's a list of some our favorite, other Great Moments in Cher:
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There's lots to love about Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, out this week on Blu-ray from MGM Home Entertainment. The "Child Catcher" character continues to scar generation after generation generation of kids (including Marilyn Manson, who named his Smells Like Children album after the creepy guy's catchphrase), a handful of catchy ditties by the legendary Sherman Brothers will lodge themselves into your brain, and of course, there's that really cool flying car. (OK, yes, the 1968 special effects probably haven't aged all that well, but they looked good on crappy 1970s TV sets.)
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