This year's Best Actress Oscar-winner, Natalie Portman, was getting critical raves from the moment she hit the screen with prepubescent performances in The Professional and Beautiful Girls. But for a few in her very exclusive sorority, the road to the Academy Award was paved with the kind of movies that don't get talked about on the red carpet in front of the Kodak Theatre. Case in point: BMX Bandits (out this week on DVD and Blu-Ray from Severin Films), starring a frizzy-haired teenager named Nicole Kidman.
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Charles Schulz's landmark comic strip Peanuts has occupied a unique niche in American pop culture. It's part of a medium often aimed at children, and its cast is a group of kids under the age of 10, doing normal child-like activities like playing baseball, going to school, and ice skating. But these kids also talk about Beethoven, theology, and The Brothers Karamazov. They throw around words like "depressed" and "neurotic," and one of them puts up a "Psychiatric Help" stand instead of selling lemonade. The strip balances hilarity with the fragility of life and the pain of existence, and that balance surfaces in Peanuts' first two big-screen adventures, A Boy Named Charlie Brown and Snoopy, Come Home (both available this week as a two-disc DVD from CBS Home Entertainment and Paramount Home Entertainment).
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Satire at its best goes after the most sacred of cows -- religion, politics, the rich and powerful. When it's done bravely, satire brazenly stands up and stares down the thing that dominates or terrifies the most. And given that terrorism and the threat of same has been the leading tightener of sphincters worldwide, Four Lions (out this week from Magnolia Home Entertainment and Drafthouse Films) has to rank among the timeliest and most courageous films in recent memory. It's also side-splittingly hilarious.
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One of the interesting ideas in the original graphic novel Watchmen is the notion that in a world where meta-humans actually existed, superhero comics would become obsolete. After all, why read about the fictional adventures of Superman or The Flash when Dr. Manhattan is in the newspaper every day? I thought about that while watching the Farrelly Brothers' lackadaisical new comedy Hall Pass -- one scene (involving a sneeze and an explosive bowel movement) was clearly meant to shock and amuse us, but the audience seemed unmoved. And it occurred to me that any fictional gross-out is destined to pale next to the real stuff you can see in Jackass 3 (out this week in a Blu-Ray/DVD combo pack from Paramount Home Entertainment).
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There's been a great deal of gnashing of teeth online this week over Universal deciding not to pony up $150 million for At the Mountains of Madness, a horror epic based on an H.P. Lovecraft book that was to star Ron Perlman and Tom Cruise with Guillermo Del Toro directing. The kvetching over this feature's demise was surpassed only by the kvelling over Del Toro dropping out as director of The Hobbit. But relax, people -- the always-busy Del Toro has already announced another directorial project (Pacific Rim, set for 2013), and the in the meantime you can take in a snappy horror flick he produced, Rage (Rabia), out this week from Strand Releasing Home Entertainment.
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The new Mystery Science Theater 3000 XX box (out this week from Shout! Factory) features the two Master Ninja "movies," although in reality they're just four cobbled-together episodes from the mostly-forgotten 1984 NBC martial-arts series The Master, which starred Timothy Van Patten as a nasal-talking doofus who hooks up with an older mentor (Lee Van Cleef) who happens to be the only "Occidental ninja" on earth. Van Patten has won awards as a director of HBO projects like The Pacific, Sex and the City, and The Sopranos, but MST fans will always remember his ridiculous acting on this forgettable TV show. Not that he's the only respectable artist haunted by his hokey TV past. Consider:
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So not only does Take Me Home Tonight get the small details wrong -- someone makes a Rain Man reference even though TMHT is set during Labor Day Weekend 1988 and Rain Man wouldn't be seen for a few more months -- it also fails to capture the charm and the laughs that we think of when we recall the great teen flicks of the 1980s. And even taking the great John Hughes out of the equation (and seriously, TMHT, how very DARE you have sent your characters to "Shermer High"? Blasphemy!), there are plenty of actual '80s movies that will bring you far more joy this weekend on DVD than this crappy new comedy. Ahead, five better options.
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There's nothing weirder than someone else's nostalgia. Case in point: The animated series ReBoot (the first two seasons of which Shout! Factory is releasing on DVD this week), hailed as the first completely computer-animated half-hour TV series. If you were young enough to be watching Saturday morning cartoons in 1994, when the series debuted, you may be excited about revisiting Guardian Bob and his adventures in protecting the Mainframe from Megabyte. Those of us without fond memories are more likely to look at this rudimentary animation and cringe a bit at how far the medium has come in a relatively short time.
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Don't get me wrong -- I don't believe that children should be prevented from scraping their knees or eating dirt or falling off the furniture or anything else that teaches them how the world works and gives them the healthy scar tissue that turns them into functional adults. Similarly, I don't see anything wrong with entertainment aimed at kids that includes moments which might be scary or surprising, or -- as in the case of the Disney classic Bambi, out today in a "Diamond Edition" Blu-ray -- frank about death. But man, I still remember how much that film, and others like it, knocked me for a loop when I was a kid.
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None of its songs made the fifth slot in the Best Original Song category -- and we were even deprived of hearing co-host James Franco warble the Diane Warren-composed, Cher-sung ballad "You Haven't Seen the Last of Me" -- but Burlesque (new on DVD and Blu-Ray this week from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment) suddenly seems a more viable entertainment option after enduring the three-hour Trail of Tears that was this year's Academy Awards ceremony.
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Nowadays, we're used to significant overlap between the Oscars and the Independent Spirit Awards. All five of this year's Best Actress nominees at the Academy Awards are in the running for both trophies, while smaller companies like the Weinstein Company and Sony Pictures Classics often dominate the nominations on both fronts. But independent film used to operate at the periphery of the Oscar action -- if at all -- until the landmark awards of 25 years ago.
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While nü-school auteurist stinkers like Birdemic: Shock and Terror (out this week on DVD and Blu-Ray from Severin Films) and The Room continue to pack midnight screenings all over the country, there's been a recent backlash against the audiences who are entertained by seeing these bonkers movies. The current complaint is that anyone who wants to see these films automatically has to be a condescending hipster who's there to sneer at the amateurishness of the acting and the logic-defying writing. And true, those people exist -- but there are other reasons to watch a movie like Birdemic beyond plain mockery.
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One of the amusing running gags in Barry Levinson's Diner is a character who wanders through the movie, constantly muttering lines from Sweet Smell of Success, newly available in a snazzy new Blu-Ray edition from The Criterion Collection. And with dialogue this good -- courtesy of Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman, based on Lehman's story -- who can blame the guy for wanting to recite these delicious lines over and over? "The cat's in the bag, and the bag's in the river," "You're dead, son; get yourself buried," "Your mouth is as big as a basket, and twice as empty," "In brief, from now on, the best of everything is good enough for me" -- this is staccato word jazz of the most delicious variety.
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Generations of filmmakers have learned that putting your characters in a car and unleashing them on the open highways of the world is a sure-fire formula for drama. With Indian import Road, Movie hitting DVD this week from New Video and the Tribeca Film Festival, it seemed like the perfect excuse to create a completely incomplete and thoroughly arbitrary list of our Favorite Road Pictures.
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With Shout! Factory releasing the Mystery Science Theater 3000 take on Ray Dennis Steckler's horror musical The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies on DVD this week -- coming on the heels of the widespread acclaim for Sundance midnight entry Hobo with a Shotgun -- it seemed like as good a time as any to look at some of the most unwieldy, memorable, and occasionally even poetic movie titles ever concocted. Such as:
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