Hard though it may be to believe, there are still plenty of movies that have never seen the light of home video players. "Over the last 12 years," Susan King writes in the Los Angeles Times, "Warner Home Video has released about 1,200 vintage films from its vast library on DVD. But that still leaves about 3,800 feature titles that have yet to make their digital debuts. At the studio's current release rate of 100 per year, they wouldn't all be available until midcentury." Now, in a truly surprising move, WB has decided to get all Mom-and-Pop, hands-on in its efforts to stuff home editions of its back catalog into eager, waiting hands. Monday, the Warner Archive website began offering customers the chance to place on-line orders for movies that have been given the green light for "official" DVD release, because the necesary demand for them is presumed to not exist. But fans can now buy burns of any of 150 titles, with plans to add another twenty or so titles every month. Those available now range from obscure classics such as Peter Brooks's The Beggar's Opera with Laurence Olivier and the 1931 film version of Noel Coward's Private Lives to cultish oddities such as The D.I., with Jack Webb playing R. Lee Ermey and Yes, Giorgio, Luciano Pavarotti's mad fling at being a romantic movie lead, to films that plug holes in the careers of people like Clark Gable (Cain and Mable, Idiot's Delight, Honky Tonk) and Michael Curtiz (Mission to Moscow).

Read More...

All Roger Ebert, in town for the Toronto International Film Festival, wanted to do was watch a movie.  (Whether or not the movie, Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire, was worth watching or not is still a matter of some debate, but advance word is pretty good.  Sure, that's what they told me about Trainspotting.)  Unfortunately, because of the way the man sitting in front of him was sitting, he wasn't able to see the subtitles, and, because recent bouts with cancer, he was also unable to speak.  So he simply tapped the guy on the shoulder and gestured for him to move over a bit.  In a perfect world, that would be the end of the story, and you certainly wouldn't be reading about it here.

Of course, in a perfect world, there would be no such thing as a the New York Post.  It so happened that the slouching dimwit in front of Ebert was their witless film critic, Lou Lumenick.  Lumenick responded to Ebert's requests first by yelling "Don't touch me!" at him, as if he were a bristly hobo taking up two seats on the LIRR, and then by spinning around and whacking the beloved Chicago critic with something (a rolled-up program, say some; a festival binder, say others).  Happily, the room was filled with hundreds of international journalists, and Lumenick was duly shamed as the story spread all over the internet, marking the first time since 1872 that a New York Post employee experienced the feeling of shame.

Read More...