DVD Digest for February 12, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 15:00:00 GMT

This week, one of 2007's best films comes to DVD, and a master's musicals get the box-set treatment.

DVD of the Week: Most of the most beloved films of Ernst Lubitsch's career come from its final years, when the Lubitsch touch had already become well-established. But it's easy to forget that the master had already had a fruitful career long before Ninotchka, The Shop Around the Corner, and To Be or Not to Be. With the films included in this box set, Lubitsch was one of the first filmmakers to integrate song and narrative after the advent of talkies. But this would mean little today if the films themselves didn't hold up, and they do, with all of Lubitsch's trademark charm and Pre-Code sophistication. Eclipse has given their typical treatment (no extras, but lovely transfers) to the films The Love Parade, Monte Carlo, One Hour With You, and The Smiling Lieutenant, which boast some of the era's quintessential stars — Maurice Chevalier, Claudette Colbert, and Jeannette MacDonald. As always, Eclipse and parent company Criterion succeed in filling in another hole in cinema history.

Incidentally, today is my birthday, so if anyone out there is looking for a suitable gift, you could do a whole lot worse than this.

A bumper crop of more recent films being released on DVD this week, including: Ben Affleck's surprisingly great Gone Baby Gone (Buena Vista, also Blu-Ray); James Gray's searing crime drama We Own the Night; Becoming Jane (Buena Vista, also Blu-Ray), the second Austen-themed dramedy in as many weeks; John Cusack in The Martian Child (New Line); No Reservations (Warner, also Blu-Ray), the Catherine Zeta-Jones-starring remake of 2001's Mostly Martha; Tyler Perry's latest hit, Why Did I Get Married? (Lionsgate); the Apollo-mission documentary In the Shadow of the Moon (ThinkFilm); and John Turturro's polarizing star-studded quasi-musical, Romance and Cigarettes (Sony). In addition, this week finally sees the DVD release of Amy Heckerling's long-delayed I Could Never Be Your Woman (Genius Entertainment), starring Michelle Pfeiffer, Paul Rudd, and Atonement Oscar nominee Saoirse Ronan. If nothing else, now we can see what all the fuss was about.

Back to classics, this week also brings Sony's The Stanley Kramer Film Collection, a collection of five films Kramer directed and/or produced. The centerpiece of the set is a new 40th Anniversary Edition of Kramer's once-controversial interracial-marriage drama Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Also in the set is the Kramer-directed Ship of Fools, as well as The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, A Member of the Wedding, and The Wild One, all of which he produced.

Other older films coming to DVD include: The Joan Crawford Collection Volume 2 (Warner), which includes Sadie McKee, Strange Cargo, A Woman's Face, Flamingo Road, and Torch Song; Fox's Charlie Chan Collection Volume 4; and Kenneth Branagh's 1991 dramedy Peter's Friends (MGM), boasting an enviable cast, including Branagh, then-wife Emma Thompson, Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry, and Imelda Staunton. For some reason, MGM has seen fit to package the film in a box set alongside the misguided Elmore Leonard/Paul Schrader satire Touch, the 1988 Patrick Dempsey-Jennifer Connelly vehicle Some Girls, and Scott Baio and Willie Aames in Zapped! Strange bedfellows indeed.

Finally, if you're jonesing for TV on DVD, this week sees the release of season 1 of The Equalizer (Universal), as well as the Vern-approved Blade: the Series (New Line). But fear not — only one more week until the release of Walker, Texas Ranger: The Complete Fourth Season, the rare DVD that can be enjoyed by both Chuck Norris fans and Conan O'Brien watchers.

Amy Heckerling: Fast Times in a Clueless Hollywood

Phil Nugent — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 19:00:00 GMT

In a better movie world, filmmakers like Amy Heckering would constitute the backbone of the industry. Heckerling doesn't have a colossal artistic reputation or rack up Academy Award nominations. She's a mainstream, commercial director, and some of her hits, such as Look Who's Talking and its sequel and National Lampoon's European Vacation, are pure, unapologetic hackwork. But she's intelligent and talented, with a special, sensitive feeling for the comedy of adolescent romantic confusion, and at least twice, in Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Clueless, she's plowed those qualities into modest-seeming projects that have taken on the status of modern classics. But Clueless came out more than a dozen years ago, and since then, Heckerling has only managed to get one new movie into theaters, the sweet but underbaked Loser (2000). Heckerling has spent much of the time since then working on a comedy called I Could Never Be Your Woman. Heckerling wrote the script back in 1999, drawing on what she knows herself about the difficulties that women — especially women who aren't as young as they used to be — face in Hollywood. The movie stars Michelle Pfeiffer as a fortysomething TV producer with career problems, single-mother problems, and a confusing, budding romance with a younger man — Paul Rudd, who got his big break playing Alicia Silverstone's love interest in Clueless. (For Woman, Heckerling cast the then-unknown young actress Saoirse Ronan as Pfeiffer's daughter; Ronan has since won an Oscar nomination for her work in Atonement.) After years of delays, the movie is finally being released on DVD on February 12. In a story in Entertainment Weekly (not available on-line), Missy Schwartz writes that the movie's path to direct DVD release comes only "after coming this close to a theatrical release more times than Heckerling can remember" and terms the situation "something of a sub-cultural curio. It's a modestly budgeted indie that, while far from perfect, never got the chance it deserved, hitting every speed bump and knocking over every traffic cone along the way."

Initially Heckerling was going to make the movie for Paramount, but the project never got off the ground there, something that Heckerling believes had at least something to do with "concern about doing a movie with an older female protagonist — not anybody's favorite demographic." Heckerling then secured financing from Philippe Martinez, a controversial figure who, in 2005, set up Bauer Martinez Entertainment, which he promised to turn into the biggest indie film studio in the U.S. Martinez did allow Heckerling to get the movie made, though not without some odd compromises: for financial reasons, she was obliged to shoot the film in London and try to pass it off as Los Angeles. And by the time the film was completed, Martinez had decided that, contrary to his original plans, his company wasn't up to distributing its own movies. A distribution deal with MGM fell through, and other interested parties backed off after discovering that the DVD and non-pay-TV rights had already been signed away to The Weinstein Company, a move that Heckerling likens to saying, "Here, but my baby. I've cut its legs off, but it's still cute." Is Heckerling at least happy that her baby will be available to be seen now? She doesn't seem unhappy. Well, she doesn't seem miserable about it. But, at fifty-three, she isn't even promising that she'll direct again. "I don't want to work for the hell of it," she says.

The Screengrab : i could never be your woman

DVD Digest for February 12, 2008

Amy Heckerling: Fast Times in a Clueless Hollywood