THE SPECIAL EDITION: COMING SOON – 01.31.08

posted on
01.31.2008

The redesign has a few hiccups, but things are looking pretty good anyway. You might have noticed the Blogs that are being done by writers and friends of the site and you can access mine RIGHT HERE, where you can read my ramblings about comic books, Academy Award nominated films and the importance of Shrek the Third. Speaking of the Oscars, I have some news of a couple of this year’s front runners.

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
Release Date: March 11, 2008

The Coen Brothers return to form will be released in March on regular DVD and Blu-Ray. Based on the novel by Cormack McCarthy, No Country for Old Men tells the story of a drug deal gone wrong and a very, very bad man played by Javier Bardem. There will not be much in the way of special features with the exception of three making-of documentaries (Working with the Coen: Reflections of Cast and Crew, The Making of No Country for Old Men, and Diary of a County Sheriff).

THERE WILL BE BLOOD
Release Date: unknown

This was mentioned in the forums, so I went ahead and checked out cigarettes and red vines, the unofficial P.T. Anderson website and confirmed what I found to be disappointing news. First, the DVD will not feature commentary. The website reported that Anderson stated a lot of the buzz had been taken from doing them because people quote them back verbatim to him in interviews and fun/flippant comments are regarded as gospel. I really didn’t have a problem with no commentary in Magnolia since the documentary was so informative. However, on There Will Be Blood, the behind-the-scenes footage that was shot will, as of this point, not be included on the DVD because “it’s just a bunch of people in a desert standing around making a movie.” On a positive note, there is extremely old documentary footage that was found about mining and oil production from the era they are planning to cut in Jonny Greenwood’s score over top of it and make a presentation out of it. That’s about all that is known so far about the movie’s release.

THE MIST
Release Date: March 25, 2008

If you were to ask me what the greatest adaptation of a Stephen King work was, I would say Shawshank Redemption. Director Frank Darabont got his start with the Dollar Baby The Woman in the Room, made in 1982. It was the third official Dollar Baby adaptation, but is widely considered the definitive one. In the first nineteen years of Stephen King’s Dollar Baby, there were only a handful of adaptations. Since Darabont let the cat out of the bag in his introductions to his screenplays of Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, there have been over forty of these short films made. Since then, Darabont had joked he was the go-to guy for Stephen King prison movies. He might have broken that string when he released one of King’s most beloved short stories, The Mist. The film tells the story of people stuck in a supermarket when a fog rolls in and mysterious creatures attack. There will be two versions, a single disc edition and a 2-Disc special edition. The single-disc will include an audio commentary by writer/director Frank Darabont, eight deleted scenes with optional commentary, and A Conversation with Stephen King and Frank Darabont featurette. The two-disc edition will include all that, along with an exclusive black-and-white presentation of the film (as well as the color version), and five featurettes (When Darkness Came: The Making of The Mist, Taming the Beast: Shooting Scene 35, Monsters Among Us: A Look at the Creature FX, The Horror of It All: The Visual FX of The Mist, and Drew Struzan: Appreciation of an Artist). There is no news yet on a high definition release.

Hey, it looks like Blu-Ray won this little format war …

Wall Street: February 05