Anyone who has read Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax, or seen this spring’s blockbuster animated movie, knows that the truffula forest was critical to the survival of many peculiar species.
In “Serenade,” one of three bonus mini-films on the upcoming Blu-ray release, we see just how the bear-like Brown Bar-ba-loots use those colorful tufts to keep the species going — with a little help from Auto-Tune.
Sixty-two years after its initial release, Sunset Boulevard is ready for another close-up. Billy Wilder’s 1950 film about an aging, addled silent-film star has been restored and is coming to Blu-ray for the first time on Nov. 6.
Sunset Boulevard, which won three Oscars and has been named one of the best films of the 20th century by AFI, was one of the first movies to treat the Hollywood dream factory with bitterness and cynicism. It’s the tale of hack writer Joe Gillis (William Holden) — we first meet him floating lifelessly in a swimming pool — whose luck goes from bad to worse after he becomes entangled in the web of Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), a faded screen vamp clinging to delusions of a glorious comeback.
Wilder’s noir brilliantly flirted with reality: Swanson herself had been a huge silent-screen star who struggled professionally once sound was introduced; Cecil B. DeMille appears in a pivotal role as himself, while shooting an epic on the Paramount lot; and Desmond’s valet was played by accomplished silent-era director Erich von Stroheim. Upon seeing an early screening of the film, an angry Louis B. Mayer publicly confronted Wilder for his depiction of their industry and suggested he go back to Germany. Fortunately, Wilder stayed. The aging Mayer was fired from MGM the following year, and other studio heads were more forgiving. Wilder “recovered” to direct Sabrina, Some Like It Hot, and The Apartment, among other classics.
The new Sunset Boulevard Blu-ray includes extensive in-depth bonus materials, including a new deleted scene. Paramount has selected two striking images as potential covers for the new edition, and they’d like your input on which is best. One is a version of an original 1950 movie poster, with Desmond lurking over Gillis and his new screenwriter girlfriend (Nancy Olson). The other is a classic photo of Desmond admiring her stage pose in her bedroom mirror. Click below to view them both, in addition to a quick video clip to remind you of the film’s magnificence. Then be sure to vote on the image you prefer before the poll closes on July 27. The winner will grace the Blu-ray upon its release on Nov. 6.
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Image Credit: Myles Aronowitz
Fans of You Can Count On Me were forced to wait 11 years for director Kenneth Lonergan’s second film. Filmed way back in 2005, Margaret is the harrowing story of a manipulative New York City teenager (Anna Paquin) whose involvement in a fatal bus accident thrusts her into an adult world she’s unprepared to navigate. The movie, which features an all-star cast that also includes Matt Damon, Mark Ruffalo, and Matthew Broderick, seemed doomed to eternal limbo when the director, his producers, and Fox Searchlight could not agree on a final cut. Lonergan had been promised total control, as long as his finished film was less than 150 minutes long. Unfortunately, the cut he originally submitted ran longer than three hours. Lawsuits were exchanged. For years, neither side blinked, and the film nearly passed into oblivion as its stars moved on to bigger things. (Paquin found True Blood, Damon went back to the Bourne franchise, Ruffalo earned an Oscar nomination and was cast as a raging superhero.)
When Margaret was finally released last September — with a running time of 149 minutes and 49 seconds — many would have to buy plane tickets to see it, as it never played in more than 14 theaters. Though it didn’t even gross $50,000 and was neglected by the Oscars, some critics championed the film as one of the year’s best. Tomorrow, fans of Lonergan’s work who don’t live in New York and Los Angeles can finally see it for themselves. Or more precisely, they can view two versions of the film that are included in a Blu-ray combo pack: the theatrical release and Lonergan’s extended three-hour cut.
Before the extended version of Margaret is screened tonight in New York — to be followed by a Q&A panel with Lonergan, Ruffalo, Broderick, and moderator Tony Kushner — the director checked in with Entertainment Weekly.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Margaret is a film that is difficult to shake, and there are so many themes woven throughout. As a storyteller, what was the seed of the story that everything else grew out of?
KENNETH LONERGAN: There was a girl in my high school who told me that this [bus accident] had happened to her — and that was the literal seed. I was just 16 but it always stayed with me. But I think the impetus was the idea of this girl trying to cope with all these adult problems and issues with only the equipment of a teenager to help her. It seemed compelling to me: that a very very young person confronted with death and injustice and the force of other people’s lives getting in the way of her finding what she thinks she’s going to find, which is justice and some sort of way to atone for what she’s done — which she’s unable to do. READ FULL STORY »
The existence of Marvel’s latest short film has been stirring speculation for weeks, though no one knew for sure exactly what it was, who stars in it, or what the title means.
What is Item 47? Now, finally, some answers.
The film is the latest in the company’s series of shorts dubbed “One-Shots,” a comic book term for stories that wrap up in one issue. Lizzy Caplan (Party Down, pictured) and Jesse Bradford (Flags of Our Fathers) star as a down-on-their-luck couple who find one of the discarded alien guns from the finale to The Avengers — and proceed to make some incredibly bad decisions.
The Avengers has already made enough money to pay for two dozen Hawkeye spin-offs. But all the big movies you so enjoyed watching in May inevitably become the movies you watch in September, dreaming of the days when summer vacation seemed like it would last forever. So let it be written, so let it be done: Avengers is hitting Blu-Ray on September 25th. Watch the trailer for the home release below:
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For fans of cult movies, Internet treasure troves don’t get much more treasure-y — or, I guess, trove-y — than Trailers From Hell!, the site where Gremlins director Joe Dante and his fellow “grindhouse gurus” talk viewers through vintage film promo clips.
Image Credit: Frank Russo/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images
After producing Animal House in 1978 — an experience that only reinforced his desire to direct — 31-year-old Ivan Reitman gave himself a five-month window to conceive and shoot his own movie. He started with a simple premise — a crazy summer camp — but not much else in terms of Hollywood support or financing. (The budget was less than a million dollars.) But he thought he had an ace in the hole in Bill Murray, the then-27-year-old who was just emerging as one of the new faces on Saturday Night Live. If only he could persuade the contrarian comic, who he knew from The National Lampoon show in New York, to show up to the rustic camp in Ontario where the cast and crew were filming in August 1978. Even then, Murray was difficult to pin down. “It’s not like he was a big star or anything,” says Reitman. “But he’s always kind of been iconoclastically difficult about agreeing to be in things. And also hard to reach. But I refused to take no for an answer and … he showed up on set on the second day of shooting.”
It’s a beautiful thing he did. Though Meatballs isn’t a perfect film, it’s pure mainlined Murray, establishing the smirking, irreverent persona that would run wild in other Reitman collaborations, like Stripes and Ghostbusters. With Meatballs arriving today on Blu-ray and On Demand for the first time, Reitman talked to EW about the little film that launched him and his hilarious star to Hollywood stardom, and how he still holds out hope for another Ghostbusters film — with Murray.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Summer-camp movies are practically a sub-genre unto themselves now, but I don’t recall a lot of them before Meatballs. Was it something new, or had there been older camp movie you had absorbed?
IVAN REITMAN: There were a couple of camp films that were suddenly all starting about the same time. I think there was a movie called Little Darlings, and I vaguely remember Norman Lear writing some camp film that didn’t get made that was planned about that time. For me this was an antidote to my not being allowed to direct Animal House. I had worked on it three years, brought Belushi into it, and ended up producing the film, but my original intention was always to direct it. But because I had really only directed this small $12,000 improvised comedy called Cannibal Girls, the studio wouldn’t let me do it, and so we hired John Landis who did a great job. But I really wanted to direct, and literally, as soon as our cut was done on Animal House, I called a couple of friends up, Len Blum and Dan Goldberg, who all gone to camp at various places — sometimes together — in Ontario, Canada. I said, “Let’s see if we can put this summer-camp movie together.” READ FULL STORY »
Image Credit: Daniel Smith
It’s becoming the norm to use two devices at once while consuming entertainment. We watch TV with our phones in hand, ready to tweet our minute-to-minute reactions. Along with the newest Netflix delivery, we keep our laptop handy, set to check IMDb to instantly relieve any nagging feelings of “I know I’ve seen that actress in something before.”
The entertainment industry has taken note: The most buzz-worthy tech to come out of this year’s E3 convention was the Wii U, a videogame console that includes a touchscreen embedded on the controller. There’s even talk of allowing cell phone use in movie theaters. And now, Warner Bros. is inviting viewers at home to use their tablets while watching the DVD for the latest Sherlock Holmes movie, starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law.
WB’s Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadowsmovie app syncs with the Blu-ray disc for the film. The Blu-ray/DVD pack hits stores tomorrow, but if you’re eager to watch one of its features before then, you can check out this EW exclusive video, a featurette on Holmes-o-vision with interviews from producers Lionel Wigram and Susan Downey and director Guy Richie.
It’s no secret that John Carter went through extensive additional photography in its two-year gestation period from production to premiere. While director Andrew Stanton gave a full-throated defense of the new scenes as a part of the creative process he’d learned while working at Pixar, the bad press caused by them contributed to the impression that John Carter was a troubled movie.
One of the biggest scenes that Stanton reshot was the opening to the film. In its Oct., 2011, profile of Stanton, The New Yorker chronicled the Pixar brain trust’s reaction to the scene, which heavily featured Lynn Collins as Barsoomian (i.e. Martian) Princess Dejah Thoris: “[T]hey were confused by the film’s beginning, in which Princess Dejah delivered a lecture about the state of the Barsoomian wars, and they found her arch and stony.”
The opening was re-imagined with a pithier history of the Barsoomian wars, cutting directly to a pitched aerial battle, and much of Collins’ scene was reshot and placed later in the film. But you can see the original scene in this exclusive clip from the John Carter Blu-ray edition (out June 5) below. Many of the visual effects are not complete; the shots of rock faces in the Arizona and Utah desert, for example, were meant to be digitally remade into the crumbling edifices of once-great Barsoomian buildings. But the thrust of the scene is still clear. Check it out: READ FULL STORY »
Image Credit: Merie Weismiller Wallace
Spurred by the success of the film’s 3-D theatrical re-release, Paramount Home Media Distribution and Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment have announced that Titanic will makes its Blu-ray debut on Sept. 14. The Oscar-sweeping epic will be available as a four-disc Blu-ray/DVD combo pack in both 2-D and 3-D formats, with 2.5 hours of bonus footage including a National Geographic documentary in which director James Cameron explores the wreckage of the actual Titanic. The special features will also be stocked with 30 deleted scenes, more than 60 behind-the-scenes featurettes, three commentary tracks, and 2,000 photos. For the first time, Titanic fans can download the film digitally so they’ll never have to let go of their favorite film.
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