Last week I went to see Diggers, a new film written by State player Ken Marino and starring Paul Rudd. I liked it a lot – the movie is set on Long Island in 1976 as corporate clamming starts to disrupt the generational clam digging trade. It’s a wonderfully observed character piece that’s perfectly served by some great performances. It’s not the kind of movie that ends up on year end top tens, but it’s the kind of movie that you wish would get made a little more often, a movie about and for regular humans and not superheroes, supercops, or supercomedians.
The movie hits theaters on April 27th, but while tooling around the web this morning I discovered that it’s actually a day-and-date release – Diggers is coming out on DVD on May 1st, four days after the theatrical opening. Funnily enough I’m doing the press day for the film in a couple of weeks and none of the publicists have mentioned this aspect; I guess they are worried that people won’t cover the movie if it’s day-and-date, or that the day-and-date aspect will drive the coverage too much.
For CHUD readers this is going to be a good thing, as I think this is a movie that will appeal to a lot of you out there, but that most of you also won’t be living near a theater that will play the film (honestly, just move already). Click here to pre-order the film from Amazon.com. I think you’ll like it. Interestingly while the day-and-date thing is a real change from how business is done, the difference between the theatrical poster and the DVD cover is very old school. The poster is so much better than the DVD as to be tragic.