You Don't Mess With the Zohan (2008)
dir. Dennis Dugan
I know it looks pretty stupid, but give it a chance, especially if you like Adam Sandler, even a little bit. One of the funniest movies of the year so far in my opinion.
Product Description:
If You Don't Mess with the Zohan feels like an extended and crazed sketch from Saturday Night Live, there are reasons for that. Zohan's star and SNL alumnus Adam Sandler is joined by several fellow cast members (in uncredited cameo roles) from his years on the NBC show. But Sandler also co-wrote the film's absurdist script with SNL veteran writer and sometime-performer Robert Smigel. Echoes of a few of their classic skits on the show--built around high-strung Israeli characters obsessed with disco and selling junk electronics out of a New York shop--are in revisited in Zohan and are a lot of fun to see again. Zohan is unbridled nonsense thrown at the wall, but with a sunny disposition that proves surprisingly persuasive. Sandler stars as an Israeli intelligence operative who fakes his death to reinvent himself in New York City as a hairdresser. Putting the lie to assumptions that any man in that professional field must be gay, Zohan routinely provides raucous sexual favors for all of his older female customers. The sight of bottles of gels and hairsprays falling off shelves while the indefatigable Zohan pleasures randy grannies on the other side of a salon wall is pure SNL, and is funnier than it might sound. The silly story involves an old, Palestinian enemy of Zohan, the Phantom (John Turturro), showing up in Manhattan, but everything is really leading to a Big Apple version of the resolution of Israeli-Palestinian conflicts we'd all like to see on a large scale. The film is almost instantly forgettable, and there are many times it veers toward the dumb, but it also sells itself well as a nutty concept. --Tom Keogh
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Sleeping Beauty (1959)
dir. Clyde Geronimi
Product Description:
Disney's 1959 animated effort was the studio's most ambitious to date, a widescreen spectacle boasting a gorgeous waltz-filled score adapting Tchaikovsky. In the 14th century, the malevolent Maleficent (not dissimilar to the wicked Queen in Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs taunts a king that his infant Aurora will fatally prick her finger on a spinning wheel before sundown on her 16th birthday. This, of course, would deny her a happily-ever-after with her true love. Things almost but not quite turn out that way, thanks to the assistance of some bubbly, bumbling fairies named Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather. It's not really all that much about the title character--how interesting can someone in the middle of a long nap be, anyway? Instead, those fairies carry the day, as well as, of course, good Prince Phillip, whose battle with the malevolent Maleficent in the guise of a dragon has been co-opted by any number of animated films since. See it in its original glory here. And Malificent's castle, filled with warthogs and demonic imps in a macabre dance celebrating their evil ways, manages a certain creepy grandeur. --David Kronke
DVD Features:
All-New Digital Restoration With Enhanced Picture And Sound
All-New 5.1 Disney Enhanced Home Theater Surround Sound
All-New Once Upon A Dream Music Video, Performed By HANNAH MONTANA'S Emily Osment
Sleeping Beauty Castle Walkthrough A Fully Immersive Virtual Tour
All-New Enhanced Dance Game With Help From Briar Rose's Forest Friends, You Can Learn How To Dance
Never-Before-Seen Alternate Opening
Deleted Songs
All-New Making Of SLEEPING BEAUTY Featurette
And Much, Much More
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The Happening (2008)
dir. M. Night Shyamalan
Product Description:
You'd expect the end of the world to be no day in the park, but in M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening, a day in the park is where the end begins. One otherwise peaceful summer morning, New Yorkers strolling in Central Park come to a halt in unison, then begin killing themselves by any means at hand. At a high-rise construction site a few blocks over, it's raining bodies as workers step off girders into space. And all the while, the city is so quiet you can hear the gentle breeze in the trees. That breeze carries a neurotoxin, and what or who put it there (terrorists?) is a question raised periodically as the film unfolds. But the question that really matters is how and whether anybody in the Middle Atlantic states is going to stay alive. The Happening is Shyamalan's best film since The Sixth Sense, partly because he avoids the kind of egregious misjudgment that derailed The Village and Lady in the Water, but mostly because the whole thing has been structured and imagined to keep faith with the point of view of regular, unheroic folks confronted with a mammoth crisis. Focal characters are a Philadelphia high-school science teacher (Mark Wahlberg, excellent), his wife (Zooey Deschanel) and math-teacher colleague (John Leguizamo), and the latter’s little girl (Ashlyn Sanchez). Instinct says get out of the cities and move west; most of the film takes place in the delicately picturesque Pennsylvania countryside, with menace hovering somewhere in the haze. There are no special effects (apart from a wind machine and some breakaway glass), but the movie manages to be deeply unsettling in the matter-of-factness of its storytelling. Especially effective is its feel for what we might call the surrealism of banality. One warning sign that someone has been infected by the neurotoxin is irrational or erratic speech and behavior, yet Shyamalan has a genius for dialogue that sounds normal and everyday as it's spoken, yet flies apart grenade-like a second later as its logic (or illogic) sinks in. Then there's Deschanel's eye-rolling dodginess about the messages some guy has been leaving on her cellphone. Or the fellow (Frank Collis) who addresses his greenhouse plants as though they were his children--has a stray toxic zephyr wafted his way, or is this just his idea of normal? --Richard T. Jameson
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The Visitor (2008)
dir. Tom McCarthy
Richard Jenkins is the MAN. That is all.
Product Description:
A deeply moving drama built around longtime character actor Richard Jenkins, The Visitor is a simmering drama about a college professor and recent widower, Walter Vale (Jenkins), who discovers a pair of homeless, illegal aliens living in his New York apartment. After the mix-up is resolved, Vale invites the couple--a young, Syrian musician named Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) and his Senegalese girlfriend (Danai Gurira--to stay with him. An unlikely friendship develops between the retiring, quiet Vale and the vital Tarek, and the former begins to loosen up and respond to Tarek’s drumming lessons as if something in him waiting to be liberated has finally arrived. All goes well until Tarek is hauled in by immigration authorities and threatened with deportation. His mother, Mouna (Hiam Abbass), turns up and stays with Vale, sparking a renewed if subdued interest in courtship. But the wheels of injustice in immigration crush all manner of hopes in post-9/11 America. Vale soon realizes his unexpected capacity for anger over Tarek’s plight, and the positive changes to his personal life that emerged from a deep involvement with his friend and Mouna, might be the only legacy he takes from this experience. Writer-director Thomas McCarthy has created a wonderfully measured story about change and renewal, and put it all on the shoulders of Jenkins, a largely unheralded but masterful performer whose time for renown has surely come. --Tom Keogh
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The Simpsons - The Complete Eleventh Season (1999)
dir. n/a
Product Description:
The Simpsons is the ultimate (if very unorthodox) nuclear family. Homer, the lovable dufus father, stumbles apathetic ally through his family life and work at the local nuclear power plant. Marge, the overbearing but responsible mother, Bart, the 4th grade underachiever and nemesis to Springfield elementary's principal, Lisa, the brainy and responsible 8 year old, and Maggie, the oft-forgotten baby, round out the family. Based on a series of small cartoon sketches from the Tracy Ullman show, the Simpsons enjoy many wacky exploits in their hometown and beyond. Other characters include an incompetent lawyer, the tyrranical nuclear power plant owner, the too-perfect neighbors (the Flanders) of the Simpsons, and the less than perfect "Klown", Krusty. Colorful characters and situations abound.
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Le Doulos - Criterion Collection (1964)
dir. Jean-Pierre Melville
Can't get enough Melville. I'm surprised there are still films of his that Criterion hasn't got ahold of yet.
Product Description:
The backstabbing criminals in the shadowy underworld of Jean-Pierre Melville's Le doulos have only one guiding principle: Lie or die. A stone-faced Jean-Paul Belmondo stars as enigmatic gangster Silien, who may or may not be responsible for squealing on Faugel (Serge Reggiani), just released from the slammer and already involved in what should have been a simple heist. By the end of this brutal, twisty, and multilayered policier, who will be left to trust? Shot and edited with Melville's trademark cool and featuring masterfully stylized dialogue and performances, Le doulos (slang for an informant) is one of the filmmaker's most gripping crime dramas.
DVD Features:
New, restored high-definition digital transfer
Selected-scene audio commentary by film scholar Ginette Vincendeau, author of Jean-Pierre Melville: An American in Paris
Video interviews with directors Volker Schlöndorff and Bertrand Tavernier, who served as assistant director and publicity agent, respectively, on the film
Archival interviews with Melville and actors Jean-Paul Belmondo and Serge Reggiani
Original theatrical trailer
New and improved subtitle translation
PLUS: A new essay by film critic Glenn Kenny
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Le Deuxième Souffle (1966)
dir. Jean-Pierre Melville
Product Description:
With his customary restraint and ruthless attention to detail, director Jean-Pierre Melville follows the parallel tracks of French underworld criminal Gu (the inimitable Lino Ventura), escaped from prison and roped into one last robbery, and the suave inspector, Blot (Paul Meurisse), relentlessly seeking him. The implosive Le deuxième soufflé captures the pathos, loneliness, and excitement of a life in the shadows with methodical suspense and harrowing authenticity, and contains one of the most thrilling heist sequences Melville ever shot.
DVD Features:
New, restored high-definition digital transfer
Audio commentary by film scholar Ginette Vincendeau, author of Jean-Pierre Melville: An American in Paris, and film critic Geoff Andrew of the British Film Institute
New video interview with director Bertrand Tavernier, who served as publicity agent on the film
Archival footage featuring interviews with Melville and Lino Ventura
Original theatrical trailer
New and improved subtitle translation
PLUS: A new essay by film critic Adrian Danks
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Touch Of Evil (50th Anniversary Edition) (1958)
dir. Orson Welles
Product Description:
Considered by many to be the greatest B movie ever made, the original-release version of Orson Welles's film noir masterpiece Touch of Evil was, ironically, never intended as a B movie at all--it merely suffered that fate after it was taken away from writer-director Welles, then reedited and released in 1958 as the second half of a double feature. Time and critical acclaim would eventually elevate the film to classic status (and Welles's original vision was meticulously followed for the film's 1998 restoration), but for four decades this original version stood as a testament to Welles's directorial genius. From its astonishing, miraculously choreographed opening shot (lasting over three minutes) to Marlene Dietrich's classic final line of dialogue, this sordid tale of murder and police corruption is like a valentine for the cinematic medium, with Welles as its love-struck suitor. As the corpulent cop who may be involved in a border-town murder, Welles faces opposition from a narcotics officer (Charlton Heston) whose wife (Janet Leigh) is abducted and held as the pawn in a struggle between Heston's quest for truth and Welles's control of carefully hidden secrets. The twisting plot is wildly entertaining (even though it's harder to follow in this original version), but even greater pleasure is found in the pulpy dialogue and the sheer exuberance of the dazzling directorial style. --Jeff Shannon
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Paranoid Park (2007)
dir. Gus Van Sant
Product Description:
It's hard to believe that a middle-aged filmmaker can fully evoke the chaotic, anxious world of a troubled teenager, but that's what Gus Van Sant has done with Paranoid Park. Alex (newcomer Gabe Nevins), a teenaged boy whose parents are going through a difficult divorce, is drawn to the rough community that's built up around the titular skateboarding park in Portland, Ore. One night, when an older boy is showing him how to hop a freight train, Alex accidentally kills a security guard. The movie captures the before and after by looping back and forth in time, focusing far more closely on Alex's state of mind than the investigation that threatens to close around him. Filmgoers leery of the drawn-out, atmospheric sequences of Van Sant's recent films (like Gerry and Last Days) need not fear; though Paranoid Park favors mood over plot, it successfully balances character, mood, and story, resulting in considerable dramatic tension, similar to Van Sant's meditation on the Columbine shootings, Elephant. This is not a thriller; Paranoid Park pays as much attention to Alex's relationship with his girlfriend Jennifer (Taylor Momsen, Gossip Girl) as to the killing. The result is a vivid, compelling portrait of adolescence, in all its messiness and confusion. This may be Van Sant's best film since his early masterpieces, Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho. --Bret Fetzer
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Vertigo (Universal Legacy Series) (1958)
dir. Alfred Hitchcock
These Hitchcock movies have been released on DVD about a bazillion times a piece, but they've never looked better than on these Universal Legacy Series DVDs. Veritgo is my favorite of all Hitchcock movies, but he's made so many classics that it's almost impossible to pick a favorite (although it usually seems to be between Vertigo and Rear Window).
Product Description:
Although it wasn't a box-office success when originally released in 1958, Vertigo has since taken its deserved place as Alfred Hitchcock's greatest, most spellbinding, most deeply personal achievement. In fact, it consistently ranks among the top 10 movies ever made in the once-a-decade Sight & Sound international critics poll, placing at number 4 in the most recent survey. (Universal Pictures' spectacularly gorgeous 1996 restoration and rerelease of this 1958 Paramount production was a tremendous success with the public, too.) James Stewart plays a retired police detective who is hired by an old friend to follow his wife (a superb Kim Novak, in what becomes a double role), whom he suspects of being possessed by the spirit of a dead madwoman. The detective and the disturbed woman fall ("fall" is indeed the operative word) in love and...well, to give away any more of the story would be criminal. Shot around San Francisco (the Golden Gate Bridge and the Palace of the Legion of Honor are significant locations) and elsewhere in Northern California (the redwoods, Mission San Juan Batista) in rapturous Technicolor, Vertigo is as lovely as it is haunting. --Jim Emerson
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Rear Window (Universal Legacy Series) (1954)
dir. Alfred Hitchcock
Product Description:
Like the Greenwich Village courtyard view from its titular portal, Alfred Hitchcock's classic Rear Window is both confined and multileveled: both its story and visual perspective are dictated by its protagonist's imprisonment in his apartment, convalescing in a wheelchair, from which both he and the audience observe the lives of his neighbors. Cheerful voyeurism, as well as the behavior glimpsed among the various tenants, affords a droll comic atmosphere that gradually darkens when he sees clues to what may be a murder.
Photographer L.B. "Jeff" Jeffries (James Stewart) is, in fact, a voyeur by trade, a professional photographer sidelined by an accident while on assignment. His immersion in the human drama (and comedy) visible from his window is a by-product of boredom, underlined by the disapproval of his girlfriend, Lisa (Grace Kelly), and a wisecracking visiting nurse (Thelma Ritter). Yet when the invalid wife of Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr) disappears, Jeff enlists the two women to help him to determine whether she's really left town, as Thorwald insists, or been murdered.
Hitchcock scholar Donald Spoto convincingly argues that the crime at the center of this mystery is the MacGuffin--a mere pretext--in a film that's more interested in the implications of Jeff's sentinel perspective. We actually learn more about the lives of the other neighbors (given generic names by Jeff, even as he's drawn into their lives) he, and we, watch undetected than we do the putative murderer and his victim. Jeff's evident fear of intimacy and commitment with the elegant, adoring Lisa provides the other vital thread to the script, one woven not only into the couple's own relationship, but reflected and even commented upon through the various neighbors' lives.
At minimum, Hitchcock's skill at making us accomplices to Jeff's spying, coupled with an ingenious escalation of suspense as the teasingly vague evidence coalesces into ominous proof, deliver a superb thriller spiked with droll humor, right up to its nail-biting, nightmarish climax. At deeper levels, however, Rear Window plumbs issues of moral responsibility and emotional honesty, while offering further proof (were any needed) of the director's brilliance as a visual storyteller. --Sam Sutherland
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Psycho (Special Edition) (Universal Legacy Series) (1960)
dir. Alfred Hitchcock
Product Description:
At last--a great American movie available on video for the first time in its original aspect ratio. For all the slasher pictures that have ripped off Psycho (and particularly its classic set piece, the "shower scene"), nothing has ever matched the impact of the real thing. More than just a first-rate shocker full of thrills and suspense, Psycho is also an engrossing character study in which director Alfred Hitchcock skillfully seduces you into identifying with the main characters--then pulls the rug (or the bathmat) out from under you. Anthony Perkins is unforgettable as Norman Bates, the mama's boy proprietor of the Bates Motel; and so is Janet Leigh as Marion Crane, who makes an impulsive decision and becomes a fugitive from the law, hiding out at Norman's roadside inn for one fateful night. Psycho gets the masterpiece treatment it deserves on DVD, with extras including newsreel footage surrounding the making and release of the movie; an archive of production stills; the special trailer in which Hitchcock (acting as one of the original Universal Studio tour guides) himself leads viewers around the Bates place; credit designer Saul Bass's original "shower scene" story boards; posters and advertising materials for the movie's William Castle-like publicity campaign (No One Will Be Seated After the Feature Begins!); and a 90-minute documentary on the making of the film! What more could any movie fan possibly want? --Jim Emerson
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Young Frankenstein (1974)
dir. Mel Brooks
One of the funniest movies ever. If you didn't already know that, then I'm not really sure why you're even looking at this whole thing to begin with.
Product Description:
If you were to argue that Mel Brooks's Young Frankenstein ranks among the top-ten funniest movies of all time, nobody could reasonably dispute the claim. Spoofing classic horror in the way that Brooks's previous film Blazing Saddles sent up classic Westerns, the movie is both a loving tribute and a raucous, irreverent parody of Universal's classic horror films Frankenstein (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935). Filming in glorious black and white, Brooks re-created the Frankenstein laboratory using the same equipment from the original Frankenstein (courtesy of designer Kenneth Strickfaden), and this loving attention to physical and stylistic detail creates a solid foundation for nonstop comedy. The story, of course, involves Frederick Frankenstein (Gene Wilder) and his effort to resume experiments in re-animation pioneered by his late father. (He's got some help, since dad left behind a book titled How I Did It.) Assisting him is the hapless hunchback Igor (Marty Feldman) and the buxom but none-too-bright maiden Inga (Teri Garr), and when Frankenstein succeeds in creating his monster (Peter Boyle), the stage is set for an outrageous revision of the Frankenstein legend. With comedy highlights too numerous to mention, Brooks guides his brilliant cast (also including Cloris Leachman, Madeline Kahn, Kenneth Mars, and Gene Hackman in a classic cameo role) through scene after scene of inspired hilarity. Indeed, Young Frankenstein is a charmed film, nothing less than a comedy classic, representing the finest work from everyone involved. Not one joke has lost its payoff, and none of the countless gags have lost their zany appeal. From a career that includes some of the best comedies ever made, this is the film for which Mel Brooks will be most fondly remembered. Befitting a classic, the Special Edition DVD includes audio commentary by Mel Brooks, a "making of" documentary, interviews with the cast, hilarious bloopers and outtakes, and the original theatrical trailers. No video library should be without a copy of Young Frankenstein. And just remember--that's Fronkensteen. --Jeff Shannon
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Ray Harryhausen Collection (20 Million Miles to Earth, Earth vs. Flying Saucers, It Came from Beneath the Sea, 7th Voyage of Sinbad)
Product Description:
20 Million Miles to Earth
When an American spaceship crash-lands off the coast of Sicily, a rescue team discovers that the crew has brought back a gelatinous mass that soon hatches and evolves into a strange bi-ped creature which increases in size rapidly. Soon 20-feet tall, the creature rampages through Rome before being destroyed as it seeks refuge in the Colosseum.
The 7th Voyage of Sinbad
It's an incredible cinematic adventure as the legendary Sinbad sets off on a dangerous journey to the mysterious Island of Colossus. His quest is to break the spell cast over his beloved princess by a diabolical magician. But before he can save her, Sinbad must battle an awesome collection of mythical monsters, the man-eating Cyclops, a saber-wielding skeleton, a ferocious two-headed bird called the Roc and a fire-breathing dragon. Starring Kerwin Mathews, Kathryn Grant, Torin Thatcher and highlighted by the stunning visual effects mastery of Ray Harryhausen. Now in a pristine, hi-definition transfer that captures the magic of Harryhausen's "eye-popping" special effects in dazzling Technicolor.
It Came from Beneath the Sea
A giant stop-motion-animated octopus (with six arms) attacks San Francisco. A pair of scientists and a nuclear sub captain try to stop it before it tears down the Golden Gate Bridge.
Earth vs. the Flying Saucers While driving through the desert with his wife Carol Marvin to a military base to send the eleventh rocket to the orbit of Earth for helping the exploration of the outer space in the Operation Sky Hook, Dr. Russell A. Marvin and Carol see a flying saucer and accidentally records a message in their tape recorder. Once in the base, Dr. Russell is informed by his father-in-law and general that the ten first satellites had mysteriously felt on Earth. When Dr. Russell decodes the message, he encounters the aliens that ask him to schedule a meeting with the leaders of Earth in Washington in 56 days with the intention to invade Earth without panicking the population. Dr. Russell develops an anti-magnetic weapon that becomes that last hope of human race against the hostile aliens.
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Watership Down (Deluxe Edition) (1978)
dir. Martin Rosen
Product Description:
Much like Richard Adams's wonderful novel, this animated tale of wandering rabbits is not meant for small children. It is, however, rich storytelling, populated with very real individuals inhabiting a very real world. The animation is problematic, sometimes appearing out of proportion or just subpar; but it seems to stem from an attempt at realism, something distinguishing the film's characters from previous, cutesy, animated animals. A band of rabbits illegally leave their warren after a prophecy of doom from a runt named Fiver (Richard Briers). In search of a place safe from humans and predators, they face all kinds of dangers, including a warren that has made a sick bargain with humankind, and a warren that is basically a fascist state. Allegories aside, Down is engaging and satisfying, and pulls off the same amazing trick that the novel did--you'll forget that this is a story about rabbits. --Keith Simanton
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