The recently released Spike Jones: Legend DVD (Infinity) offers hours of footage of the legendary bandleader and musician who specialized in satirizing musical forms and popular songs with his own unique arrangements. It’s a delicious collection of material of an artist whose records are much more well-known than his live

performances—at least, to today’s audiences. With Legend, Jones’s son, ...Read More

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Set in Montreal, Monterey Media’s Steel Toes (available now) tells the story of a neo-Nazi skinhead (Andrew Walker) who is on trial for the heinous hate-crime of murdering a Pakistani man. His court-appointed attorney is a liberal Jewish Layer (David Strathairn) who finds himself spending an unsurprisingly fiery day with his newest client in a meeting at this prison.

A rather intense subject, yes, so it’s not surprising that the film’s writer and producer, David Gow (the film is based upon his own 2000 play Cherry Docs), conscripted a co-director to work with filmmaker Mark Allen whom he knew could carry off the job of putting it on screen: himself. Thus, Gow added the film credit of "director" to his resume.

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“The TV Set isn’t really a satire,” writer/director Jake Kasdan told us in a recent interview, referring to his current new release. “It’s more of a kind of, well, let’s say that there’s nothing that happens in the movie that couldn’t and doesn’t happen all the time in real life.”

 

Starring David Duchovy, Sigourney Weaver and Ioan Gruffudd, the Fox release concerns a TV writer/producer (Duchovny) about to embark on his latest comedy project—a personal one involving his

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“There’s a little bit of stuff they do in post-production and they designed two cameras specifically for this shoot,” said actor Sid Haig of his experiences working on Night of the Living Dead in 3-D, which was released on DVD last month by Lionsgate.  “For all intents and purposes, you couldn’t tell you were doing anything out of the ordinary.”

 

This latest version of George Romero’s legendary zombie saga throws in plenty of homages to the original 1968 film (at one point, a pair of characters are seen watching the original on TV!), while Sid Haig essays a new role, that of a creepy mortician who explains the reasons that the recently ...Read More

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Looking at an online list of works of the late novelist and playwright Iran Levin, who died of natural causes earlier this week at the age of 78, I was surprised to note that the man had a surprisingly modest output of work. Levin wrote seven novels over a course of four decades and only a handful of plays, but if ever

there was an argument that consistent quality and not quantity should distinguish an oeuvre, then Levin’s body of work...Read More

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Tony Bennett: The Music Never Ends (Warner, available now), a rich and well-mounted musical documentary focusing on the famed American singer, marks the latest collaboration between filmmakers Clint Eastwood and Bruce Ricker. The two have worked together for some 20 years, ever since Eastwood exec produced 1988’s Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser, which was produced by Ricker. Since then, Ricker has been a music consultant on such Eastwood films as The Bridges of Madison County and Mystic

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Produced in 1989 and originally exhibited at animation and shorts festivals before in went on to a renewed life in theaters preceding Finding Nemo in 2003, Knick Knack, the computer-animated Pixar short film directed by John Lasseter. I was psyched to hear that it was going to be a segment in the just-released Disney DVD Pixar Short Films Collection: Vol.1 as I missed it when I saw Finding Nemo in the theater (okay, I walked in a little late!) and I don’t own the Nemo disc.

 

It’s a cute little short about a snowman in a souvenir snow...Read More

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Director John Dahl’s latest film, You Kill Me, starring Ben Kingsley , Tea Leoni and Luke Wilson, is a bit of departure of sorts from the neo-noirs--Kill Me Again, Red Rock West and The Last Seduction--that helped forge his career back in the Nineties. It’s got its share of murder, yes, but this time it revolves around a

boozing, flailing hitman (Kingsley) who moonlights at a funeral home and the go-for-broke woman (Leoni) who mee...Read More

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Afterburner Films CEO Dave Riggs is readying to produce a DVD Premiere movie about the world of jet fighters that will be filmed entirely in 3-D. Teaming with Riggs on the project is Mehran Salamanti, the aerial photographer and Oscar-nominated inventor of the Hotgears Camera System. The movie, Need for Speed,

concerns to daredevils who perform aeronautic stunts to win the affections of a woman they are both pursuing. Riggs will perform the aerial stunts. The film is slated to start production in early 2008 ...Read More

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Warner's latest Stanley Kubrick DVD collection (the third one from the studio in under a decade), Stanley Kubrick: Warner Home Video Directors Series, was released last week and I've been working my way

through the set's fine complement of supplements. Each of the five films--2001, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket and ...Read More

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As is often the case on DVD release press junket, the big guns who came out to promotee a film when it was released theatrically are suddenly “unavailable” when it comes time to do the DVD publicity several months later. Such was the case for Live Free or Die Hard, the fourth entry in the venerable Die Hard series, which Fox will issue on disc on Nov. 20. Bruce Willis didn’t make it to the early November promotional gathering at New York’s Ritz Carlton Hotel, nor did director Len Wiseman (who may have been busy preparing the third installment in his vampires vs. werewolves epic Underworld), but in their place, the DVD press got a chance to spend a few minutes with Live Free or Die Hard co-stars Maggie Q and Justin Long!

The p...Read More

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Speaking to filmmaker Werner Herzog, not surprisingly, is a little like viewing one of his films: Obsessions are revealed, mythologies are grafted onto realities and the truth comes out. But what specific parts are true—and just how accurate are these true parts--now, there’s the mystery. Such was the feeling I had after wrapping up a phone interview I had with legendary director of Aguirre, Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo and Grizzly Man concerning his prodigious output and his latest feature, Rescue Dawn, which Fox will release on DVD on Nov. 20.

 

VB: Rescue Dawn concerns U.S. fighter pilots stru...Read More

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