Welcome to The Special Edition. For those that did not catch it, I released all the Coming Soon news in a separate column last week and this new format will simply be all the releases for this Tuesday. I am hoping it will make it easier for you to navigate through and I am sure it will make it easier for me to put together for you every week. Also, I will now list the prices for the new releases in the actual write up for the films. This way, if you just want to know how much a new release will cost, it will be right there where it is listed at.
NEW RELEASES
Bridge to Terabithia
d. Gabor Csupo
c. Josh Hutcherson, AnnaSophia Robb, Zooey Deschanel, Robert Patrick
Best Buy: $16.99
Circuit City: $16.99
Target: $15.99
Amazon.com: $15.99
DeepDiscount.com: $18.86
Bridge to Terabithia is based on the 1977 novel by by Katherine Paterson, which won the Newbery Medal in 1978. It tells the story of two kids, both loners who don’t feel they fit in at their schools, who become friends and creates a magical forest kingdom. The evil creatures of Terebithia are all based on the people who give them a hard time at school. The kids then use the fantasy land to help them deal with the problems that they face every day at school and in life. This has just been a brief discussion of the movie, but I have not seen it yet, and the plot outline sounds really good, so I’ll just leave it at that.
SPECIAL FEATURES
- Behind the Book: The Themes of Bridge to Terabithia
- Digital Imagination: Bringing Terabithia to Life “Keep Your Mind Wide Open” Music Video Performed by AnnaSophia Robb
- Audio Commentary with Gabor Csupo, Jeff Stockwell and Hal Lieberman
- Audio Commentary with Josh Hutcherson, AnnaSophia Robb and Lauren Levine
Miss Potter
d. Chris Noonan
c. Renee Zellweger, Ewan McGregor, Emily Watson
Best Buy: $19.99
Circuit City: $19.99
Target: $39.98 with the hardcover book “Beatrix Potter: A Journal”
Amazon.com: $21.99
DVDPacific.com: $21.22
Miss Potter tells the story of Beatrix Potter, the author of the best-selling children’s book The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Potter was basically a middle aged woman who had turned down every suitor she had and still lived with her parents. Her parents were exasperated by her refusal to grow up, as she remained a recluse, only befriending the animals that she had created stories about since her childhood. When she finally succeeds in selling a book of her stories, it slowly begins a series of events that allows her to finally escape her parent’s lifestyles and London itself.
SPECIAL FEATURES
- Feature Commentary with Director Chris Noonan
- The Making Of A Real Life Fairy Tale
- The Life and Times of Beatrix Potter
Reno 911! Miami (Unrated Edition)
d. Robert Ben-Garant
c. Robert Ben-Garant, Thomas Lennon, Kerri Kenney-Silver, Wendi McLendon- Covey
Best Buy: $16.99
Circuit City: $16.99
Target: $16.99
Amazon.com: $16.99
DeepDiscount.com: $20.79
I will admit, I really never really cared much to watch Reno 911. I loved, absolutely loved The State. However, with Reno 911, I just sort of felt like it was not all that funny. It was obviously funny enough, and popular enough to warrant a movie, though. From The State, we get Thomas Lennon, who plays Lieutenant Jim Dangle, an ambiguously gay sheriff’s deputy; Robert Ben Garant as redneck Deputy Travis Junior and Kerri Kenney-Silver, as as Deputy Trudy Wiegel, an emotionally unstable, heavily-medicated hypochondriac, with multiple psychological disorders. Well, the plot for the movie sounds like a re-make of Police Academy 5: Assignment Miami Beach. The Reno department goes to Miami for a Police Convention when a terrorist attack, mixed with a quarenteen of the hotel where all the other law enforcement agencies are staying leaves the Reno 911 cops as the only ones who are left to save the day. You also get lots of cameos from other alumns from The State. The movie will be released in both rated and un-rated editions. As you can see, the Unrated version blows the regular version out of the water extras-wise.
THEATRICAL RATED VERSION
- Audio commentary by Director/Writer Robert Ben Garant and Writers Thomas Lennon and Kerri Kenney-Silver
- Alternate Ending (with optional commentary by Robert Ben Garant, Thomas Lennon and Kerri Kenney-Silver)
- Extended Scenes (with optional commentary by Robert Ben Garant, Thomas Lennon and Kerri Kenney-Silver)
- Wiegel and Williams Watch TV
- Convention Check-In
- Drug Lord On Boat
- Fox Movie Channel Presents: Making a Spoof
- Trailers
- Easter Egg: Paul Rudd Talks To Deputies
UN-RATED VERSION
- Audio commentary by Lt. Dangle, Deputy Junior, Deputy Wiegel and Deputy Williams
- Audio commentary by Deputy Garcia, Deputy Johnson, Deputy Jones and Deputy Kimball
- Audio commentary by Director/Writer Robert Ben Garant and Writers Thomas Lennon and Kerri Kenney-Silver
- Extended Scenes (with optional commentary by Robert Ben Garant, Thomas Lennon and Kerri Kenney-Silver)
- Public Service Announcements
- Shut the F*** Up
- Shooting in the Theater
- Illegal Duplications
- Some Fun Just Can’t Be Downloaded
- Fox Movie Channel Presents: World Premiere
- Trailers
- Easter Egg: Dangle and Junior in the Alley
OLDER MOVIES AND RE-RELEASES
Criterion Collection is releasing three discs this week that might interest you. I don’t know really anything about the movies, so I’ll let Criterion tell you about them.
WR: MYSTERIES OF THE ORGANISM: What does the energy harnessed through orgasm have to do with the state of communist Yugoslavia circa 1971? Only counterculture filmmaker extraordinaire Dusan Makavejev has the answers (or the questions). His surreal documentary-fiction collision WR: Mysteries of the Organism begins as an investigation into the life and work of controversial psychologist and philosopher Wilhelm Reich and then explodes into a free-form narrative of a beautiful young Slavic girl’s sexual liberation. Banned upon its release in the director’s homeland, the art-house smash WR is both whimsical and bold in its blending of politics and sexuality. According the wikipedia.com, the film is a series of plots and interviews intercut with one another. Despite different settings, characters and time periods, the different plots produce a single story of human sexuality and revolution through a montage effect. The DVD will be a one-disc release and will include a new, restored high-definition digital transfer, supervised and approved by director Dusan Makavejev, audio commentary assembled from Raymond Durgnat’s 1999 book on the film, Hole in the Soul, Makavejev’s 1994 tragicomic autobiographical short film, originally made for the BBC, new and archival video interviews with Makavejev, a new and improved English subtitle translation plus an essay by critic Jonathan Rosenbaum.
* Best Buy: $34.99, Circuit City: $34.99, Amazon.com: $27.99, DeepDiscount.com: $25.88
SWEET MOVIE: Pushing his themes of sexual liberation to their boiling point, Yugoslavian art-house provocateur Dusan Makavejev followed his international sensation WR: Mysteries of the Organism with this full-throated shriek in the face of bourgeois complacency and movie watching. Sweet Movie tackles the limits of personal and political freedom with kaleidoscopic feverishness, shuttling viewers from a gynecological beauty pageant to a grotesque food orgy with scatological, taboo-shattering glee. With its lewd abandon and sketch-comedy perversity, Sweet Movie became both a cult staple and exemplar of the envelope pushing of 1970s cinema. Extras will include a new, restored high-definition digital transfer, supervised and approved by director Dusan Makavejev, new video interviews with Makavejev and Balkan film scholar Dina Iordanova, a featurette where actress Anna Prucnal sings a song from the film, a new and improved English subtitle translation plus a booklet featuring new essays by critic David Sterritt and Harvard professor and philosopher Stanley Cavell.
* Best Buy: $24.99 Circuit City: $19.99, Amazon.com: $20.99, DeepDiscount.com: $20.39
IF…: Lindsay Anderson’s If…. is a daringly anarchic vision of British society, set in a boarding school in late-sixties England. Before Kubrick made his mischief iconic in A Clockwork Orange, Malcolm McDowell made a hell of an impression as the insouciant Mick Travis, who, along with his school chums, trumps authority at every turn, finally emerging as violent savior against the draconian games of one-upmanship played by both students and the powers that be. Mixing color and black and white as audaciously as it mixes fantasy and reality, If …. remains one of cinema’s most unforgettable rebel yells. It will be released as a 2-Disc edition with a new, restored high-definition digital transfer, approved by cinematographer Miroslav Ondricek and assistant editor Ian Rakoff, audio commentary featuring film critic and historian David Robinson and actor Malcolm McDowell, Cast and Crew (2003), an episode from the Scottish TV series featuring interviews with McDowell, Ondricek, Rakoff, director’s assistant Stephen Frears, producer Michael Medwin, and screenwriter David Sherwin, a new video interview with actor Graham Crowden, Thursday’s Children (1954), Academy Award–winning documentary about a school for deaf children, directed by Anderson and Guy Brenton and narrated by Richard Burton and a booklet featuring pieces by critic David Ehrenstein, screenwriter David Sherwin, and director Lindsay Anderson.
* Best Buy: $34.99 Circuit City: $34.99, Amazon.com: $29.99, DeepDiscount.com: $25.88
OTHER GREAT OLDER RELEASES TO CHECK OUT:
- The Panic in Needle Park
- Arthur! Arthur!
- The Manhattan Project (Special Edition)
- The Wood (Back in the Day Edition)
- The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (Friendship Edition)
- The Shaw Brothers Collection: King Boxer, The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, The One-Armed Swordsman, My Young Auntie
THIS WEEK IN TELEVISION
Picket Fences, Season 1
Best Buy – $49.99
Circuit City – $49.99
Target – $41.99
Amazon.com – $39.99
DeepDiscount.com – $41.89
The biggest television release of the week is the release of the 1992 first season of Picket Fences. Created by David E. Kelley (Ally McBeal, L.A. Law), the show follows the lives of the residents of the small town of Rome, Wisconsin, where weird things happen, including cows giving birth to human babies, transgender teachers, and a spate of people turning up dead in freezers. Tom Skerritt (Alien) stars as Sheriff Jimmy Brock, the man who tries to maintain order in the town where murders of all kinds begin to happen and the Mayor is the most endangered species of them all. While the show had a surreal approach, it still dealt with very important subject matter including abortion, constitutional rights, homosexuality and more. It really was a show before it’s time, much like Twin Peaks before it. This release will include six discs with all the episodes from Season One as well as two featurettes.
THE HIGH DEFINITION REVOLUTION
Nothing is being released this week of note in the High Definition formats.
OTHER DVDs TO DROP YOUR CASH ON
This week may have been light on big time releases, but there are lots of things here that might pique your interest. We get the basic mish-mash of cheapo horror flicks, including one with ghost kids, one with H.P. Lovecraft’s name attached and one starring a former member of the Scoobie Gang (Xander). We also get a collection of movies starring Lucille Ball, and the 1972 Marlon Brando movie that was not called The Godfather.
THE BARGAIN BIN
CIRCUIT CITY: JUNE 17-JUNE 23
Gray Matters – $19.99
Miss Potter – $19.99
Reno 911! : The Movie – Unrated – $16.99
Breach – $19.99
Ghost Rider – $19.99
Norbit – $19.99
After Dark Horror Fest: The Abandoned – $19.99
Beyonce: B’Day Anthology Video Album – $7.99 – free poster w/purchase
The Many Adventures Of Winnie The Pooh – $15.99 – Save $6 when you buy with Bridge To Terabithia
Bridge To Terabithia – $15.99 – Save $6 when you buy with The Many Adventures Of Winnie the Pooh
Picket Fences: Season 1 – $44.99
The Die Hard Collection – $26.99 – Includes movie money to see Live Free Or Die Hard
Blu-Ray Sale: (Save $10 when you buy any 2 of the following. Save $15 when you buy any 3 of the following)
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, Apocalypto, Déjà Vu, Primeval, Bridge To Terabithia, The Prestige, Chicken Little, Dinosaur, Gone In 60 Seconds, The Wild, Invincible, The Guardian, Eight Below, Enemy Of The State
SONY BLU-RAY PLAYER: $799.99
HD-DVD Sale: (The following titles are $24.99 each)
Sky Captain & The World Of Tomorrow, We Were Soldiers, Lara Croft, Tomb Raider, The Chronicles Of Riddick, The Rundown, Apollo 13, Seabiscuit, Four Brothers, U-571, The Perfect Storm, U2: Rattle & Hum, Constantine, Blazing Saddles, The Dukes Of Hazzard: Unrated
Toshiba HD-DVD Player (WEB ID = HDA2): $399.99 – Get 5 Free HD-DVD titles with purchase of any Toshiba HD-DVD player (titles are free after mail in rebate)
$3.99 DVDs: Uncommon Valor, Rambo: First Blood – Part II, Once Upon A Time In The West, Jennifer 8, Domestic Disturbance, Stargate, Escape From Alcatraz, Amistad, Sliding Doors, Terms Of Endearment, Godsend, Universal Soldier, Orange County, Urban Cowboy, The Rainmaker, Van Wilder, Angel Heart: Special Edition, Shaft, Wayne’s World, Head Of State, The Manchurian Candidate (2004), The Punisher (2004), Changing Lanes, Double Jeopardy, Primal Fear, The General’s Daughter, Kiss The Girls, Frailty, Rules Of Engagement, Private Parts, The Score, Along Came A Spider, Election, 48 Hours, Win A Date With Tad Hamilton, SNL Collection: Best Of Will Ferrell, SNL Collection: Best Of Chris Farley
$9.99 DVDs (also buy one get one free): The Karate Kid: Special Edition, The Karate Kid II, Wild Things: Unrated, Wild Things 2, Anaconda, Anacondas: The Hunt For The Blood Orchid, Bad Boys: Special Edition, Bad Boys II, XXX, XXX: State Of The Union, Sniper, Sniper 2, Urban Legend, Urban Legends: Bloody Mary
BEST BUY: JUNE 17-JUNE 23
Reno 911!: The Movie – Unrated – $16.99
Miss Potter – $19.99
The Chronicles Of Narnia – $16.99
Saving Private Ryan: Special Limited Edition – $7.50
The Sixth Sense: Collector’s Edition Series – $7.50
The Lord Of The Rings: Fellowship Of The Ring – $7.50
Cast Away 2 DVD Steelbook Edition – $16.99
Platoon 2 DVD Steelbook Edition – $16.99
Fight Club 2 DVD Steelbook Edition – $16.99
X-Men 1.5 2 DVD Steelbook Edition – $16.99
Open Season Blu-Ray – $29.99
Casino Royale Blu-Ray – $29.99
Underworld: Evolution Blu-Ray – $29.99
After Dark Horror Fest: Unrest – $14.99 – Purchase any two After Dark Horror Fest titles together for $25
After Dark Horror Fest: The Gravedancers – $14.99 – Purchase any two After Dark Horror Fest titles together for $25
After Dark Horror Fest: Dark Ride – $14.99 – Purchase any two After Dark Horror Fest titles together for $25
After Dark Horror Fest: Reincarnation – $14.99 – Purchase any two After Dark Horror Fest titles together for $25
After Dark Horror Fest: The Abandoned – $17.99 – Purchase any two After Dark Horror Fest titles together for $25
Bridge To Terabithia – $16.99 – Save $3 instantly on any Disney DVD
Bridge To Terabithia Blu-Ray – $29.99
The Many Adventures of Winnie The Pooh – $19.99 – Save $3 instantly on any Disney DVD
Picket Fences: Season 1 – $39.99
Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea: Season 3 – Volume I – $27.99
Silver Spoons: Season 1 – $22.99
The Powerpuff Girls: Season 1 – $19.99
Pinky & the Brain: Volume III – $29.99 – Save $15 instantly on all PREVIOUS seasons of Pinky & the Brain
Animaniacs: Volume III – $29.99 – Save $15 instantly on all PREVIOUS seasons of Animaniacs
The Die Hard Collection – $26.99 – Free Movie Cash for Live Free And Die Hard
$6.99 DVDs (get $5 Transformers Concession Cash with purchase): Lara Croft, Tomb Raider: Special Collector’s Edition, Shaft (Samuel L. Jackson), Sky Captain & The World Of Tomorrow, Escape From L.A., Virtuosity, The Hunted, Rules Of Engagement, The Core, The Score, Congo, Dragonslayer: When Dragons Were Real, The Saint, K*19: The Widowmaker, Fire In The Sky, The Sum Of All Fears, The Italian Job: Special Collector’s Edition (Michael Caine), The Peace Maker
$9.99 DVDs: Sin City, Crash, Fantastic 4, Beerfest: Unrated, Stripes: Extended Cut, Eddie Murphy: Delirious, Reservoir Dogs: 15th Anniversary Gas Can Edition, City Of God, Batman Begins, The World’s Fastest Indian, V For Vendetta, Office Space: Special Edition, Nacho Libre, The Usual Suspects, The 40 Year Old Virgin: Unrated ( 1st Pressing), Apocalypse Now: The Complete Dossier, Hostel, Underworld: Evolution, Black Hawk Down, Running Scared (Paul Walker), Kill Bill: Volume I, Kill Bill: Volume II
TARGET: JUNE 17-JUNE 23
Reno 911!: The Movie – $16.99
The Many Adventures Of Winnie The Pooh – $16.99 – Save $6 with purchase Bridge to Terabithia
Bridge to Terabithia – $16.99 – Save $6 with purchase of The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh DVDs
Pinky & the Brain: Volume III – $29.99
Animaniacs: Volume III – $29.99
Little Man – $10.00
Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties – $10.00
Barnyard – $10.00
Fantastic Four (1st Pressing) – $10.00
AMAZON.COM: THE BIG DVD SALE
Click here to browse the sale yourself
$5.49 DVDs: The Fugitive, The Name of the Rose, Syriana, A Time to Kill, Dave, Memphis Belle, Three Kings, Enter the Dragon, Tin Cup, Thirteen Days, The Replacements, Lethal Weapon 4, Frequency, Wag the Dog, The Client, Heartbreak Ridge, Dumb and Dumber, Boiler Room, Swordfish, U.S. Marshals, The Negotiator, Austin Powers – The Spy Who Shagged Me, Sleepers, Under Siege, The Long Kiss Goodnight, Under Siege 2, Proof of Life, Spawn – The Director’s Cut, Mortal Kombat, Over the Top, Almost Heroes, Last Man Standing, Prehistoric Planet – Complete Set, Andersonville, Austin Powers in Goldmember, Romeo Must Die, Starsky and Hutch, Allosaurua – A Walking with Dinosaurs Special, The Desperate Trail, Mortal Kombat: Annihiliation, Just Cause, The Whole Ten Yards, The Outlaw Josie Wales, Blood Work, Lethal Weapon 2 (Director’s Cut), Knockaround Guys, Deep Cover, Exit Wounds, 15 Minutes, King of Texas, Get Carter (Stallone), National Geographic – Is It Real? Da Vinci’s Code, Bullet, Torqe, Monday Night Mayhem, Passing Glory, Framed, King’s Ransom, Moonlight Sword – Jade Lion/The Bloody Fists (Martial Arts Classics Double Feature), 50 Cent – Refuse to Die (Unrated and Unauthorized), Militant Eagle/The Prodigal Boxer (Martial Arts Classics Double Feature)