The Screengrab : imelda staunton

Trailer Review: Taking Woodstock

Paul Clark — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 16:00:00 GMT

After a decade that has taken him from martial arts masters and green behemoths to gay cowboys and resistance fighters, Ang Lee is taking on the widely-acknowledged high water mark of the Flower Power era, Woodstock. Yet for his genre-hopping, I nonetheless sense some pet Lee themes coming through in this story, especially in its story of middle-of-the-road types uneasily dipping their toes into the changing cultural seas that surround them, seen most explicitly in The Ice Storm. Yes, you respond, but how does the movie look? Pretty darn good, I think. Never having seen his television appearances, this is my first exposure to Dimitri Martin, but he looks like a capable center for this story, and Lee surrounds him with an impressive supporting cast, including Imelda Staunton, Emile Hirsch, and the ever-underrated Liev Schreiber. Another thing that intrigues me about this trailer- and the movie itself, of course- is that Lee doesn’t seem to be over-romanticizing the late 1960s the way many American filmmakers do, which is refreshing. And Eugene Levy as Max Yasgur seems strangely right to me.

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.

FYC: Supporting Actresses Not Named Blanchett or Ryan

Paul Clark — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 20:00:00 GMT

If critics' groups and Oscar prognosticators are to be believed, there were only two truly notable supporting actress performances in 2007: Amy Ryan in Gone Baby Gone and Cate Blanchett in I'm Not There. Thankfully, most people are capable of appreciating performances besides theirs, and many of them have gathered to take part in the second annual Supporting Actress Blogathon, taking place at StinkyLulu's blog.

Bloggers from all corners of the web were invited to stump for their favorite supporting actresses performance from this past year, and more than thirty performances have been celebrated so far. No one has written pieces on Blanchett or Ryan yet, but contributions have ranged from serious Oscar contenders like Tilda Swinton in Michael Clayton and Kelly MacDonald in No Country for Old Men, to more inspired choices like Imelda Staunton in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and 28 Weeks Later, and many others besides. Heck, someone even chose Julie Kavner as the voice of Marge Simpson in The Simpsons Movie. To say nothing of the dork who wrote up Kelli Garner in Lars and the Real Girl...