Blockbuster Video's brick-and-mortar locations collectively died today at age 23 after a long battle with ondemanditis; the final blow came with the announcement that its parent company plans to launch Blockbuster OnDemand -- a subscription service that will allow users to download DVD-quality films from the Internet direct to their TV sets. Services will be held simultaneously in the Foreign Films, Horror, and New Releases aisles, where movie lovers in search of elusive Tara Reid direct-to-DVD flicks will wail and gnash their teeth. Burial should take place over the next decade, as folks who have yet to upgrade from VCR to DVD (or those other ridiculously expensive and certain-to-be-obsolete-in-five-years technologies) discover the unique joys of on-demand video through their cable providers and via services such as Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Blockbuster OnDemand. Survivors include a host of local mom-and-pop video shops, John Travolta, and several hundred delicious popcorn-making machines.
Fred Claushits DVD Nov. 25, and in case you find yourself in the holiday spirit, thinking it's gotta be funny if it stars Vince Vaughn, Paul Giamatti, and Elizabeth Banks, I felt the moral obligation to remind you that IT'S NOT.
Is there a holiday film that you strongly believe deserves the treatment Rudolph received (pre-fog)? Issue your own turkey alert below.
EW's special DVD issue spotlighting the 50 Sexiest Movies Ever is on stands today. (I'm kind of loving the image of Patrick Wilson and Kate Winslet engaged in hot post-pool sex on the cover; the muddy rainwater on his upper thigh really drives the "dirty" point home.) You can count down titles 50 through 26 online today, then look for the top 25 on Monday (or pick up the issue on newsstands and see 'em all now). So tell us, printmongers: Are you all worked up over a movie we left off our list? Blissfully happy about the ones we included? In heat for no apparent reason? Share your thoughts now!
Hello, constituents. You all look great today, as usual. We're working on a big project about the sexiest DVDs ever, and need your input! Vote in the polls below, and if you need inspiration, may I suggest playing Vicky See's ridiculous, hard rock-infused "What Is Sexy?" commercial in another window?
The most adorable and second-most adorable — I'll let you decide who's in which place — have to be Wall-E and EVE, from Pixar's super-awesome Wall-E. Just thinking of them makes me let out a little "Awww." And NASA's late Mars Phoenix Lander is a strong third-place contender after them. So sad! But I think the bronze is gonna have to go to my new pal Burn-E, the star of a seven-and-a-half-minute short that Wall-E lead animator Angus MacLane directed for the new Wall-E DVD. You can check the little guy out below (h/t) if you can't wait to buy the DVD next week. Burn-E, whose adventure takes place at the same time as Wall-E, is a repair robot on the Axiom spacecraft. All your favorite human and technological characters make cameos as he struggles to fix a broken gizmo of some kind. And there's a very nice score by Wall-E orchestrator J.A.C. Redford. Pretty great stuff, no?
UPDATE: Broken YouTube link replaced with a new one below. If this one disappears, too...well, go out and buy the DVD next week!
In case the plug on EW's latest Must List wasn't enough to convince you that previously unreleased Four Tops a cappella mixes, taken from original Motown session reels and re-synched to TV performances, are the a reason to own the documentary DVD Reach Out, we present the clip below.
The original Without a Paddle -- starring Matthew Lillard, Seth Green, and Dax Shepherd -- was surprisingly well-received. But I didn't think anyone watched it and thought SEQUEL. I was wrong.
Paramount Home Entertainment has announced that Without a Paddle: Nature's Calling -- starring What a Girl Wants' Oliver James and...two other guys -- will hit DVD and Blu-ray on Jan. 13. Per the release: "Everything that can go wrong goes hilariously wrong when two best friends and one zany Brit venture out into the wilderness in search of a high school sweetheart. On this trip, the stakes are higher, the river is wilder and the creatures are nuttier! Trying to grant a last wish to a little old lady (Ellen Albertini Dow), lawyer Ben (Oliver James) and nursing home attendant Zach (Kristopher Turner) join forces with a wacky Brit named Nigel (Rik Young) in search of the woman's missing granddaughter whose last known address is -- the wilderness. These three not-exactly-outdoorsmen demonstrate their subsistence level survival skills in a series of sidesplitting misadventures sure to have audiences camping out in front of the TV again and again."
Even I won't watch this movie.* Is it the most unnecessary sequel ever? If not, what is?
* Though I could be talked into screening the bonus feature Furious Nuts, a "behind the scenes look at casting the perfect squirrels for Without a Paddle: Nature's Calling."**
Pop-quiz, hot-shots. Which one of the following statements is NOT true?
A) Chrysler, Shell Oil and the U.S. Air Force have partnered to make an animated film.
B) It’s titled Tugger: The JEEP® 4x4 Who Wanted to Fly.
C) It features the voice talents of Jim Belushi, who plays a WWII JEEP, and Carrot Top, who is a nervous short-wave radio.
D) The straight-to-DVD film, which arrives in stores February 10, 2009, includes “Jim Belushi – Live in Concert” as a bonus feature.
E) My head hurts.
Answer: Trick question! All of these statements are true! I guess we can put those GM-Chrysler merger talks on hold. I smell a windfall. Now please participate in a very exciting poll!
Another Halloween has come and gone, and yet the creepiness of the holiday lives on, thanks to a couple of upcoming pop-culture releases that arrived in the mail last week.
Exhibit A: The back cover of Jim Norton's I Hate Your Guts, which features the author (wearing a suit jacket and WHITE SOCKS) taking a whiz on a crushed bouquet of yellow roses. Revolting!
Exhibit B: The DVD cover for Noelle, a "Dove Family-Approved" holiday film featuring a little girl whose facial expression falls somewhere between "come and play with us" and "are you mad? I am your daughter!" Disconcerting!
I leave it to you to make the call as to which is more disturbing. Vote in our PopWatch Poll, then share your feelings ("mommy!) in the comments section below.
Episode 1 (aired Sept. 24, 1977): Capt. Stubing's ex-wife (One Day at a Time's Bonnie Franklin) comes aboard to make him miserable and evaluate his crew. A woman (Family Ties' Meredith Baxter Birney) who posed nude for Kitten magazine when she was a struggling law student takes her congressman fiancé on the cruise to avoid the media frenzy when the photo finally surfaces. (She has to track down all the copies onboard, which is easy since men apparently had no problem reading pornography in public in the '70s.) And the "exterminator to the stars" (Good Times' Jimmie Walker) chases after his live-in girlfriend, who's leaving him because he won't pop the question. "People in love today don't get married. It spoils the relationship," he says. "See the thing today is free-dom. Didn't you see Roots?" (Think that line is bad? When the girlfriend's cabinmate, Three's Company's Suzanne Somers, spots Walker at the first port, she says, "Guess who's coming to dinner?")
Episode 2 (aired Oct. 1, 1977): A bickering husband (The Jeffersons' Sherman Hemsley) and wife (Sanford and Son's LaWanda Page) get trapped in an elevator. A neglected wife (Charlie's Angels' Jaclyn Smith) finds herself attracted to the private eye/widower her husband hired to tail her. And a poor sucker (Three's Company's John Ritter, pictured) wants to win back a golddigger so badly that he dresses in drag after Gopher tells him that the only available bed onboard must be sold to a woman. (Watch the full episode.)
The Cult of Cartman DVD, featuring 12 South Park episodes with Eric at his best worst, hits shelves today. The Archie Bunker incarnate introduces each episode by summarizing the "life lesson" it teaches. (See the one for "Cartoon Wars Part II" below.)
Which episode represents Cartman at his absolute best worst? Vote in the poll after the jump (and click here if you need a South Park episode guide to refresh your memory). If your pick didn't make the DVD, do a write-in the comments section.
Last night, I was watching the new Sleeping Beauty: 50th Anniversary Platinum Edition DVD, and thinking about how beautiful the film looks restored (watch a clip below), how wonderful it is that the extras give individual animators their due, and how, as my soon-to-be-born niece's self-appointed entertainment director, I will obviously be showing her this long before Buffy. Suddenly I was noticing things that I hadn't before: The first gift the good fairies bestow upon the baby Princess Aurora is beauty, and she is engaged at 16.
I don't want to overreact, but I also don't want to increase the odds that I'll see my niece on The Bachelor in 2028 talking about how every girl grows up wanting to be a princess. (I'll still love her if that happens; I'll just make her blog about it and link to this post.) So tell me: How do you handle classic fairy tales with girls? Do you say nothing because they're too young to read between the lines? Or, do these movies, which I hear kids watch over and over again, have enough of an impact that you need to say something like, "The three fairies were clearly bestowing their gifts in reverse order of importance. Beauty is least important, so Aurora received it first. The gift of song, which you'll learn all about on that karaoke machine I'm getting you, is of some importance, so she received it second. Education, the most important gift of all, would have been given to Aurora last had the fairies not needed to use their final present to save the princess from her death sentence. Also, because the prince was Aurora's true love, he agreed when she suggested off-screen that they have a long engagement so that she could explore the world outside the forest she'd been held captive in for 16 years."
As many of you no doubt already know,Watchmen is coming out early next year, and last night I was invited to a limited preview/short Q&A with director Zack Snyder, production designer Michael Wilkinson, and costume designer Alex McDowell. Before showing us the footage, Snyder assured the audience that he tried to stay as true to the comic as possible. Unlike previous drafts of scripts that set Watchmen in the modern era, Snyder has kept it a period piece, maintained the alternate 1985 setting, as well as most of the book's controversial final act. (Watch the trailer for the movie here.)
The first clip shown was actually the first 12 minutes of the film. After cycling through the Warner Brothers, Paramount, Legendary and DC Logos (all done in the classic black-on-yellow trade dressing of the books) the movie begins the same way the comic does: The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) meeting his grisly end at the hands of an unseen attacker. Even with the decidedly 300-like stylistic trickery (all the fight scenes have that same speed-up, slow-down effect), it was refreshing to see the visual language of the comic remain largely intact, thanks to some clever camera angles that pay direct homage to the opening panels of the comic.
Following the opening scene was one of the more fun credit sequences I've seen in a while. Snyder effectively tells the history of the alternate universe of Watchmen through a highly stylized moving photo montage set to Bob Dylan's "Times Are Changing." Showcasing some particularly black humor, the tone seems to veer slightly more towards satire than the original work.
Snyder then showcased a series of clips from various points in the movie, in no particular order (read about them after the jump)...
So I'm watching the best-of Cybill Shepherd's '95-'98 CBS sitcom Cybill on DVD, and at the end of the final episode, "Ka-Boom," Cybill (Shepherd) and her newly broke best friend Maryann (Emmy winner Christine Baranski, doing Karen Walker before Megan Mullally) are arrested for the murder of Maryann's ex, Dr. Dick. (In their defense, they didn't think he was in his car or his boat when they blew them up.) "To be continued..." the screen read. Only there's a problem: It wasn't. The series got canceled.
We all know the pain of an unresolved cliff-hanger. Five years ago, for one of EW's Guilty Pleasures issues, I actually phoned a creator of the Olsen twins' canceled sitcom Two of a Kind and demanded that he tell me whether the father (Christopher Sieber) would have gotten together with the live-in babysitter (Sally Wheeler). That led to minor ridicule around the office, of course, but also to a recurring item in EW called What Would Have Happened, where I asked creators and executive producers of TV shows taken too soon to resolve the questions their cancellations left unanswered. After I got to the bottom of Cupid, John Doe, Wonderfalls, Popular, and Miss Match -- click on those links for much-needed closure -- the magazine's TV review section underwent a redesign and there was no longer a home for WWHH. Well, we're bringing it back. Hopefully in the pages of EW, but definitely on PopWatch, where we'll be able to give the resolutions the space they deserve and you the opportunity to weigh in on them.
How do we begin? You tell us the cliff-hanger mysteries you'd like solved, and we'll try to find producers willing to talk. The shows can be recent casualties (note: sometimes the show runners are still, understandably, in the fetal position and not ready to dish) or older ones that continue to consume you. In the meantime, I took the liberty of phoning Cybill Shepherd to chat about the drama-filled end of Cybill. The interview after the jump.
Entertainment is supposed to be one of those recession-proof businesses; even in tough economic times, people still go to the movies. This summer's blockbuster box office seems to bear that out. On the other hand, an informal poll last week at Movietickets.com suggested that as many as two thirds of moviegoers have changed their ticketbuying habits as a result of the economy. (The poll is gone from the site now, but the site's publicist provided me with the poll results. Asked how the current economy had changed their moviegoing habits, 31 percent said it had done so "noticeably," 33 percent said, "drastically," and 36 percent said, "No change." There were 2,168 respondents.)
Anecdotally, I imagine this is true. Tell us, PopWatchers: Has the economy affected your spending on entertainment? If so, how has it altered your moviegoing, or music-buying, or video rentals, or book purchases? Or has your pop culture consumption remained the same?
I watch a fair amount of older TV shows on DVD, partly because I tend to review them for EW, and partly because I love being surprised by guest stars or recognizable names in the credits. Currently, I'm watching Cybill: The Collector's Edition Volume I (in stores Sept. 16), and while I somehow managed to forget that Peter Krause (pictured, left) had a recurring role as Kevin, the stiff husband of Cybill Shepherd's Sheridan's older daughter, Rachel (Dedee Pfeifer), I was smart enough to spot the names Alan Ball (pictured, inset, supervising producer/co-executive producer) and Michael Patrick King (co-executive producer) in the credits of a few of the set's 13 episodes. Alan Ball, you'll recall, went on to create HBO's Six Feet Under, which starred Krause. Michael Patrick King became an executive producer on that little HBO show called Sex and the City.
What are the best finds you've made watching older TV shows — either on DVD or TV? I still smile everytime I see the name Tom Whedon (Joss' dad) on a Golden Girls episode.
Dedicated Whovians know the rumors. Last week, the tabloid News of the World reported that two of next year’s Doctor Whos will be set in the States with a “big name” American companion. It’s nothing new: The Doc’s already had a San Francisco foray (in 1996’s DW movie) and a Yank lackey (Peri Brown, played by Englander Nicola Bryant). But it does up the ante on the show’s current cross-cultural possibilities and has me wondering: With these episodes also rumored to be David Tennant’s last, could we be in store for an American Doctor? (If so, my vote’s for Love Soup’s Michael Landes, already a veteran of U.K. TV.)
It’s only a thought — and not a completely crazy one. Just consider the scores of Brits that grace U.S. telly. We’re way past Hugh Laurie pretending to shock Emmy viewers with his English accent. At least seventeen Irish and British actors star in Fall’s major shows. That’s despite Scotsman Kevin McKidd and Londoner Michelle Ryan taking such enormous belly flops last season with Journeyman and Bionic Woman. (McKidd may return stateside for a Grey’s Anatomy stint, but Ryan’s gone home to portray a sorceress on BBC’s Merlin). And, of course, I’ve got my favorites — i.e. those thesps and series I’m dying to see. After the jump, a list and a sampling of each actor’s best homegrown work.
Yes, PopWatcher Leo once mentioned a Center Stage 2 in the comments section of a post, but I thought he/she was kidding!
Yesterday, my friend Eva (who not only saw Center Stage with me in theaters but also danced her way to the ladies' room afterward) forwarded me this link to the New York Post's GenPop blog. According to it, Center Stage: Turn it Up — love — will debut on Oxygen in November, before hitting DVD in January. Reportedly, Peter Gallagher (pictured, as Jonathan) returns long enough to enroll a self-taught prodigy in the American Ballet Academy, then give her the boot. Luckily, the young woman meets an ex-hockey player/ABA classmate — love — who gets her a job at a New York City club. GenPop predicts "an amazing dance-off to end all cinematic dance-offs." But how do they top the motorcycle's entrance? (Love. Watch it after the jump!)
Yesterday, when Annie asked you what action figure you're dying for, some of you mentioned Charlie as Green Man from FX's It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. (Enjoy a clip after the jump.) Well, we can't give you that, but we can tell you how you can take home another piece of Sunny: An official Dumpster Baby Trophy (pictured).
It seems DB, the baby the gang found outside Paddy's in Season 3 and tried to make a child star (see clip below), is the grand prize for each stop of the "SUNNY Game Show Tour," a trivia contest hitting 10 markets in preparation for the series' fourth season premiere (Sept. 18, 10 p.m. ET). Remaining dates include:
Aug. 28: Cal State Fullerton University Aug. 29: San Diego State University Sept. 2: Arizona State University Sept. 5: Kent State: Black Squirrel Festival Sept. 6: Guinness Oyster Festival: Chicago, IL Sept. 12: University of Pennsylvania: No Place Like Penn Sept. 14: Adam's Morgan Day Festival: Washington, D.C. Sept. 18: Hofstra University
For more info, or to play the online version of the game, visit this site.
If you've perused our gallery of the 25 funniest movies since 1983, you might have something you'd like to say. Like, for instance, how happy you are that Christopher Guest makes so many appearances. (Though shouldn't Waiting for Guffman be even higher?) How delighted you arethat National Lampoon's Vacation (see the vid below) got the recognition it deserves. (No. 2!) And how, even though European Vacation didn't make the cut, you still, to this day, say "Big Ben...Parliament" when you get stuck driving in a roundabout. (My last time was a month ago, in Philadelphia, when my sister was driving.)
It's a slow news day, so when I was sent a press release urging me to find out if I have "the killer instinct" by taking a series of four inkblot tests at DexterTherapy.com, I bit. Turns out, I am "completely normal." (My colleague Tanner Stransky, however, not so much. Perhaps it's because he said he found the final inkblot "arousing?")
Take the test yourself, and report your results below. I've read enough of your comments over the years to make some guesses...
P.S. Dexter: The Complete Second Season hits DVD today. The show, starring Emmy nominee Michael C. Hall (pictured), returns Sept. 28 to Showtime with season 3.
Remember Mystery Science Theater 3000? That post-modern masterpiece of cinematic deconstruction that ran on Comedy Central through 1999? You know, the one with the robots cracking jokes in front of a movie screen?
Good new for fans of the show: The brain behind MST3K, Joel Hodgson, is back at it again, spinning old B-movies into comedic gold. Hodgson and the rest of his Satellite of Love crewmates—Trace Beaulieu, Frank Conniff, Mary Jo Pehl, and J. Elvis Weinstein—have regrouped for Cinematic Titanic, a riff jam a lot like MST3K, only without the smart-alecky robots and the red jump suit. “If we just did another MST3K, we were concerned it would have that AfterMASH feel,” says Hodgson. “Sometimes it’s harder to revisit what you’ve done before. Sometimes, to get the same result, you have to do something completely different.”
And sometimes creative difference with the original show’s producer make
relaunching a sequel with the same characters too complicated (Hogdson
and Best Brains Productions fell out in 1993 over plans for what became
the 1996 feature film version of the show).
Nobody makes period pieces or mysteries quite like the Brits. Thus a British period mystery is a cracking treat. Take Foyle’s War, the ITV detective drama starring Michael Kitchen as a country DCS battling crime, the Axis, and the odd English traitor on the home front during World War II. It’s an actioner. It’s got fabulous costumes. And there’s always an absorbing whodunit (or mad bomber, or rogue pilot, or warped priest) and a psychological twist to keep things interesting. But the best thing about the show isn’t always Foyle, or the great plots, or his dashing one-legged sidekick Sgt. Milner (Wives and Daughters’ Anthony Howell)—it’s his female driver (and possible future daughter-in-law) Samantha Stewart. She’s tough without being stony. Righteous without being preachy. Girly without being frilly. You know, pretty perfect to watch.
So in honor of the recent DVD release of series 5, and to celebrate the show’s surprise renewal (it was supposed to shut up shop after its characters celebrated the end of the war this year), Honeysuckle Weeks, the actress who plays Sam, dropped us an email to answer a few questions about the show. (Seriously, anglophiles must pick up this DVD set, which also features a great guest spot by Natasha Little and the return of Julian Ovendon. It’s the best of the series, and features my fave episode, involving the bludgeoning death of a suicidal cartographer. We snagged you the clip, embedded after the jump.)
But back to the subject at hand, this is a big month for Honeysuckle: She also gives a brilliant, terrifying turn as a wacky wife (pictured) in theInspector Lynley finale airing this Sunday on PBS. I beseech you not to miss it!
Tell me how your Foyle’s War character, Sam, has changed over the course of the series. She started off the show as quite a young person, and I've tried to
keep that youthful essence as the show has progressed over the last
seven years; partly because that is part of her appeal as a character,
but also because I instinctively feel that people living during that
time had a greater degree of innocence. The war has its effects on her of course, especially in her relationships with men, but it's her spirit of ploughing on and making do and grace under fire that shines through more than world-weariness, I would say. She brings relief from some of the plot’s darker aspects by being resolutely cheerful, which is great fun to play. During the first [season] one could say she has more pluck than sense, but as the series progresses she gradually becomes less of a spanner in the works and more of a cog in the engine, so to speak. She has a stoical attitude to adversity and puts the idea of 'duty' before self, and this I think informs all the characters in Foyle's War, a selfless attitude which perhaps we'd do better to hold onto today!
It's been a crazy week. While organizing my piles of Bits and Bobs files, I noticed all the boffo stateside premieres on the horizon. Billie Piper's newest Sally Lockhart adaptation, The Shadow in the North, hits Masterpiece Mystery! on September 28th. Masterpiece Contemporary is finally bringing the Benedict Cumberbatch-led political thriller, The Last Enemy, across the pond this fall. Plus, BBC America will air Peter Kosminsky's BAFTA-winning miniseries Britz, which features another excellent turn by The Road to Guantanamo's Riz Ahmed, in November.
Then, as if to kill my buzz, Jonas Armstrong announces he's leaving Robin Hood after season 3. Wha-ha? Someone remind me the name of the show again and tell me how it will go on without its star? My Richard Armitage love aside, this series needs Robin! Yet, the creators promise Jonas' final episode will be a stunner, and that's something to hold onto. And how can I stay too sad after BBC Radio 4 announced its plan to broadcast an exclusive Torchwood set in the European Organization for Nuclear Research on September 10th—followed by interviews with Ben Miller, Eddie Izzard, and John Barrowman by celebrity physicist Brian Cox? Then I thought about David Tennant’s rave reviews in Hamlet and how Little Britain USA will premiere on September 29th (check out some of the new characters here), and I cheered up. A bit.
In that spirit, I decided to dedicate this column not to what we're losing (Jonas; The Inspector Lynley Mysteries, which ends on Sunday) but to what we're gaining in the next few weeks—namely the U.S. debuts of Skins (on BBC America), Gavin & Stacey (also on BBCA), and The Life and Times of Vivienne Vyle—and to treat you to some clips from each. All three are amazing. I hope these get you watching!
1. Skins, premieres Sunday, August 17th, at 9pm on BBC America. Don't just think of this teen soap as an English Gossip Girl with a sizable wallop of dark British humor. Think of it as a better Gossip Girl with a huge dollop of Brit smarts. And it stars About a Boy's Nicholas Hoult, all grown up and acting his pants off. Literally.
If we're talking about something that I own and wouldn't want to have to pay to replace, it would be my 20-disc Kids in the Hall Megaset. If we're speaking of things that are priceless, I would say my now-abandoned collection of "Thanks for last night!" autographs, some of which decorate my office door. (Note to impressionable young EW staffers and all aspiring journalists: I did not obtain any of these autographs while conducting an interview. I am a professional.)
I've mentioned my collection before on PopWatch. It started 10 years ago, when I was at a book signing for Jon Stewart's Naked Pictures of Famous People.
We were given Post-its to write our names on, so he'd be able to spell
them correctly. I heard him ask the person in front of me what he
should sign in his book, so I wrote "To Mandi, Thanks for Last Night!"
on my Post-it, and when it was my turn to hand my copy to Stewart, I told him
I'd made it easy for him. He wrote it, added "Va Va Va Voom!," and we
were both happy. Two days later, I went to a signing for Steve Martin's
Pure Drivel, and asked him to sign "Thanks for last night!" He
looked at me, in silence, then finally said, "Just don't hold me to it
in court." A collection was born.
Other autographs include: • Stephen Colbert — A 30th birthday present from a colleague three years ago. • Trey Parker and Matt Stone — A present for being a friend's maid of honor four years ago. • Anthony Stewart Head (that's him, dressed as Frank-N-Furter) — I got that one myself, at a Buffy fan convention, five years ago. • Jimmy Fallon — He and his sister both signed a copy of their 2003 book I Hate This Place: A Pessimist's Guide to Life. Twisted, but funny! • Ryan Seacrest — A present from a colleague, from the early days of Idol. • Dave Coulier — A present from a colleague, just because he was friends with Coulier's publicist. • Justin Timberlake — This was back in, like, 2000, maybe. He signed it "Thanx 4 last night!" — how cute was he? — and told the colleague who got it for me not to let it fall into the wrong hands. • Coolio and Smash Mouth lead singer Steve Harwell: I put them together because they were dining, separately, at a restaurant in D.C. years ago, when a friend had them each sign a cloth napkin (that I have framed in my office). Coolio wrote, "Thanx 4 last night & yesterday & the day B4. It was good!" Harwell added, "You bend like no other!" • John Wesley Harding — He signed "Thanks for last night... when you
let me play 'Little Musgrave'" because I'd had the friend who met him
ask him if he really wanted to play that song at every live show or if
he just did it because there was always someone in the crowd yelling
for it. • Rudy Boesch — I accompanied a friend to the former Survivor contestant's book signing (The Book of Rudy: The Wit and Wisdom of Rudy Boesch) in 2001. He kept repeating it: "Thanks for last night?" "Yes." "Thanks for last night?" "Yes." But he did it. • Dave Karpen — A former colleague, also obsessed with Paradise Hotel, got it for me when she ran into him doing a signing at Sephora five years ago.
You remember how the PopWatch Duel works: We ask two people for their picks on a certain topic. You decide whose list is better by casting a
vote in the comments section. They try to tell themselves that they
don't care who wins.
In honor of today's DVD release of Robot Chicken: Star Wars — which just received an A- review in EW and, oh yeah, an Emmy nomination — we asked creators Seth Green (left) and Matthew Senreich (right) to each name The Five Geekiest Pieces of Pop Culture I Own.
You remember how it works: We embed a song. You name the film that song was used in. Everyone who answers correctly feels good about themselves. (Or, maybe not...)
This week's track is Mandy Moore's "I Wanna Be With You." The answer after the jump.
You remember how it works: We embed a song. You name the film that song was used in. Everyone who answers correctly feels good about themselves.
This week's track is "And When She Danced" by Marilyn Martin and David Foster. Below, it's set to a photo montage of Martin and Foster that also includes poorly transcribed lyrics.
After the jump, the official video with scenes from the film...
Here at PopWatch, we're always overly curious to know what's
on your iPod and your nightstand, so why not reveal what's in your Netflix queue as
well? What's at the top of your list right now? (Give us up to five.) What are you the most stoked to see, once you get that movie-you-need-to-watch-for-whatever-reason out of the way?
I'll go first: I'm on a four-at-a-time plan that I split with
my husband (we have separate queues to prevent the "but I'm still waiting for..." conversation). The next two movies in my queue are Murder By Numbers to feed my obsession with Ryan Gosling (pictured), and The Wire Season 2, disc 5; because I too need to catch up on premium cable shows. And just this
morning Be Kind Rewind joined the 102
other movies that I want to see.
You remember how it works: We embed a song. You name
the film that song was used in. Everyone who answers correctly feels
good about themselves.
The song is "Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps" by Doris Day. (Hint: In the video clip below, it's set to scenes from the 1962 Doris Day-Cary Grant film That Touch of Mink; the movie we're looking for was released in 1992.)
I'm not going to make excuses. I could say that I was a recent college graduate and didn't have the money for Showtime, but I won't. I could say that no one ever suggested I watch it, but that would be a lie. So I come to you, PopWatchers, in the presence of my fellow pop-culture savants, to proffer this confession: I just watched the excellent Weeds for the first time a few weeks ago. I know. I know. Where have I been? In my defense, it seems no matter how TV-savvy one is, something always falls through the cracks. And for me, that has always been premium cable shows. Much like Entourage and Sex and the City before it, I've had to rely on TV on DVD to get with the program. Now I can hardly get enough of the marijuana mama (Mary-Louise Parker, pictured), and I've been chasing it down with a helping of my other new favorite, The Tudors (hello, Henry Cavill!).
But I can't be the only one. What shows are you finally catching up with on DVD? Is Lost no longer a mystery (or at least less of a mystery)? Do you finally understand the McFuss surrounding Grey's Anatomy? I need details!
(2) How many of the movies have you seen (counting the Lord of the Rings
trilogy as one, like we did)? I'm going to be escorted out of the
building for admitting this, but I've only seen 66 of them. No need to
chastise me, I'm on it. (Good thing I'm in the TV department...)
(3) Anyone else get a little giddy reading that run of Die Hard, Moulin Rouge, This is Spinal Tap, and The Matrix (starring Laurence Fishburne, pictured)? Perfect marathon, right? It's kind of fun to read the list and see what titles give you the warmest fuzzies (Out of Africa and Waiting for Guffman, who knew?).
I had heard about Isabella Rossellini's new role as a "insect-sex (insex?) advocate" on Sundance's educational Green Porno series, but it wasn't until a friend sent me a link to the website — which has posted the short films for streaming — that I really got uncomfortable. (And of course had to watch them all, you know, so I could write this post with the journalistic integrity required of a PopWatch scribe.) Anyway, do check 'em out if you think you'd enjoy watching Rossellini dressed in a variety of insect guises doing what the birds and the (you got it!) bees do. It's sort of SFW, in the way that the Team America marionette-sex scene is SFW. (I'd link to it, but I can't seem to find it online... curious, that.)
Here's my question about the Green Porno films — who's their intended audience? They can't be for kids, despite the cutesy outfits and soft colors. The "Snail" film (pictured) has more in common with Secretary than with Sesame Street. Especially the part where she informs us, graphically so, about where the snail's, er, anus, is unfortunately positioned. (I'm sure there's a Love Guru joke in here somewhere.)
So! If you've watched Green Porno, do you feel any differently about the former Lancome model (who, granted, has starred in some pretty out-therefilms)? Besides Rossellini, are there any other stars that have played roles that make you similarly uncomfortable?
Have you clicked through our "You Got Swerved!" gallery of movies with great twist endings? (It features The Usual Suspects with Kevin Spacey, pictured, natch.) You should. You have to click on "The Twist?" in each entry to read about it, so if you're a spoiler-phobe, it's worry-free. (If you're not a spoiler-phobe, you're one click away from knowing what all the fuss was about on any of the movies you missed.)
So, which of the films on our list had the best twist ending? And is there a movie you think deserves to be on the list that isn't? I'm only half-joking when I nominate My Best Friend's Wedding.
Happy Father’s Day from Paul Thomas Anderson! The Blu-Ray edition of There Will Be Blood has just arrived in stores, and I’d like to think that its perfect-for-dads-and-grads timing isn’t coincidental — that its release now really is intended to give the paterfamilias in your household a timely refresher course in how not to be a parent. Sure, that connection is a bit of a stretch on my part. (The delay between the standard DVD two months ago and this high-def edition really has to do with Paramount needing time to shift gears to Blu-Ray after the competing format they’d backed, HD-DVD, went kaput.) But the timing is fitting, since there’s no one who makes “family” films quite like P.T. Anderson. Yes, I’ll explain.
First, let’s correct one of the most common misperceptions about a movie that invites all kinds of misunderstandings. Think of Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” for a moment and sing this refrain: The kid is not my son. Probably a majority of reviews and blogs about the film mistakenly referred to the boy in the story, H.W, as being the “son” of the drama’s central figure, Daniel Plainview. He’s not, although you have to be paying attention during the movie’s mostly silent opening reel to realize that H.W.’s real father dies in an oil drilling accident about 13 minutes in, at which point the antihero, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, takes over the orphan’s raising. (Warning: There will be spoilers.) H.W. is a fake son, just as it turns out later that Daniel’s would-be brother, Henry, is a phony sibling, too. Why is all this so significant? Because if Anderson’s disparate films — from Boogie Nights to this one — tend to all be about anything, it’s lonely people who have either no kin or horrible kin going to great lengths to create all-new, makeshift families for themselves. And if you view Daniel Plainview himself as a sort of overgrown orphan boy whose growing monstrousness masks a longing to have some “blood” of his own, then he becomes an almost sympathetic character, instead of just the ultimate Bad Dad.
Now that Sylvester Stallone's fourth tour as Rambo was last week's No. 1 DVD rental, perhaps PopWatch can finally get a little amen to our post-opening weekend dubbing of it as "the best movie 1986 never gave us."
Mike Sampson at JoBlo could be a witness. Noting that Stallone has reportedly told a Swedish newspaper that he will "take Rambo to another genre" and "experiment a little with the character" in a fifth film, Sampson spent a considerable amount of time brainstorming possible foes. Or, at least a photo editor spent a considerable amount of time putting Rambo in pictures with the likes of John McClane, Alan "Dutch" Shaefer (Arnold Schwarzenegger's Predator character), and Chucky, as well as some jet-loving, Samuel-L.-Jackson-hating serpents (pictured).
It's safe to say that my crush on Queer as Folk's Gale Harold is on. I clicked through four of QAF's five seasons on YouTube over the weekend. You think I'm joking, but I'm not. I phoned my friend Sheila and told her that I needed an intervention: I couldn't stop watching, and that was a problem considering I actually had to read and review a book. She suggested I turn the viewing of episodes into a reward. Like read a 100 pages, watch an episode. That sounded so sane... but so beyond my level of will power. I am a binge viewer. If you give me access to 22 episodes of a show that I like, I will watch 10 of them in one sitting. Having them at my fingertips feels decadent, like they were created just to entertain me. And that's a high that lasts right up until the moment that I realize I only have one season of the show left to watch, and that maybe, after all I invested, I won't like the ending.
So, are you a binge viewer like me? (If so, tell me about your longest binge.) Are you a reward viewer like Sheila? (If so, tell me how you do it.) Or, are you a complete mystery like my friend Robb, who says he's never watched TV on DVD because the idea of having 22 episodes waiting for him is too overwhelming? ("I can't commit.")
Released on DVD today, P.S. I Love You (pictured), starring Hilary Swank and the ghost of Gerard Butler (Tonight, we karaoke in hell!), may be one of the worst romantic comedies in recent memory. It's so bad, in fact, that it inspired us to create this gallery of some of our least favorite rom-coms ever. Compiling this list provoked some heated arguments among your usually amiable EW.commers — after all, one viewer's gloppy, Cupid-forsaken mess is another viewer's cheesy delight. Inevitably, a lot of really rotten romances failed to make the cut. (For instance, I wish we'd found room for the appalling Milk Money, in which a small-town moppet fixes up widowed papa Ed Harris with hooker-on-the-lam Melanie Griffith.) Click through the gallery, then come back and tell us which reprehensible romantic comedies you'd add to the list.
Yes, I'm asking you about the ending of a movie released in 1977. But really, you should be thankful because the other issues I'm dealing with at the moment are: 1) Why did CBS cancel Secret Talents of the Stars before we got to see Young and the Restless star Joshua Morrow's "edgy rock 'n' roll juggling" routine? (I was fully prepared to tune in to find out what made it "edgy.") 2) Why do I feel as though I could crush on C. Thomas Howell if I were to let myself tune in to VH1's Celebracadabra! later this month? 3) Did I like the shoes David Boreanaz was wearing this morning on Regis and Kelly? (They were awfully blue, but they did draw attention to his striped blue socks, which I appreciated.)
Right, so about Orca... Here's the thing: I just watched it (for work!), and though I've seen it before, I don't think I ever fully grasped the ending. As you recall, the killer whale wants vengeance against Captain Nolan (Richard Harris), the man who murdered his mate and unborn baby-whale, and lures his boat into icy waters. After the whale kills everyone onboard but Charlotte Rampling, the movie ends with shots of Orca swimming underneath thick layers of ice (above). Now Nolan pointed out earlier in the film that the ice would cut both ways: It could sink his boat, but it'd also make it difficult for the whale to get to the surface for air. So, I ask you: Was that just a beautiful parting shot, or are we supposed to believe that the whale dies, too? I'm going with the latter, because the whole film was about the bond between Nolan and the Orca (Nolan's wife and unborn child were killed by a drunk driver on the way to the hospital). And the whale was driven insane with grief, like Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon, only with no Danny Glover to talk him down. Also, the whale had to die for biting off Bo Derek's leg, right? It seems obvious when I type it out now, but then you also recall the serious smackdown that Orca gave a Great White shark earlier in the film, and that it broke through the ice several times after Nolan abandoned ship. Does he live or die?
If you're still reading (God bless you), and there's another movie ending that's puzzled you, post it in the comments section below. Maybe someone can help you out, too.
Blockbuster Video's brick-and-mortar locations collectively died today at age 23 after a long battle with ondemanditis; the final blow came with the announcement that its parent company plans to launch Blockbuster OnDemand -- a subscription service that will allow users to download DVD-quality films from the Internet direct to their TV sets. Services will be held simultaneously in the Foreign Films, Horror, and New Releases aisles, where movie lovers in search of elusive Tara Reid direct-to-DVD flicks will wail and gnash their teeth. Burial should take place over the next decade, as folks who have yet to upgrade from VCR to DVD (or those other ridiculously expensive and certain-to-be-obsolete-in-five-years technologies) discover the unique joys of on-demand video through their cable providers and via services such as Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Blockbuster OnDemand. Survivors include a host of local mom-and-pop video shops, John Travolta, and several hundred delicious popcorn-making machines.
EW's special DVD issue spotlighting the 50 Sexiest Movies Ever is on stands today. (I'm kind of loving the image of Patrick Wilson and Kate Winslet engaged in hot post-pool sex on the cover; the muddy rainwater on his upper thigh really drives the "dirty" point home.) You can count down 
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So I'm watching the best-of Cybill Shepherd's '95-'98 CBS sitcom 
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I watch a fair amount of older TV shows on DVD, partly because I tend to review them for EW, and partly because I love being surprised by guest stars or recognizable names in the credits. Currently, I'm watching 
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Yesterday, when Annie asked you 
It's a slow news day, so when I was sent a press release urging me to find out if I have "the killer instinct" by taking a series of four inkblot tests at 
Remember Mystery Science Theater 3000? That post-modern masterpiece of cinematic deconstruction that ran on Comedy Central through 1999? You know, the one with the robots cracking jokes in front of a movie screen? 
Nobody makes period pieces or mysteries quite like the Brits. Thus a British period mystery is a cracking treat. Take 
As I read our 
Here at PopWatch, we're always 
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By now, you've probably clicked your way through 
I had heard about Isabella Rossellini's new role as a "insect-sex (insex?) advocate" on Sundance's educational 
Have you clicked through our 
Happy Father’s Day from Paul Thomas Anderson! The Blu-Ray edition of There Will Be Blood has just arrived in stores, and I’d like to think that its perfect-for-dads-and-grads timing isn’t coincidental — that its release now really is intended to give the paterfamilias in your household a timely refresher course in how not to be a parent. Sure, that connection is a bit of a stretch on my part. (The delay between the standard DVD two months ago and this high-def edition really has to do with Paramount needing time to shift gears to Blu-Ray after the competing format they’d backed, HD-DVD, went kaput.) But the timing is fitting, since there’s no one who makes “family” films quite like P.T. Anderson. Yes, I’ll explain.
Now that Sylvester Stallone's fourth tour as Rambo was last week's 
It's safe to say that 
Released on DVD today, 
Yes, I'm asking you about the ending of 
Oh, you thought you had it bad when thos