Daily Loaf

Your little girl is growing up right before your eyes. It seems like only yesterday she was singing along with Hannah Montana, but now she’s dreaming of junior high school pep rallies and cramming for her PSATs. After exhaustive research, we have put together the perfect gift pack for the tweenage girl on your list. Included are DVDs of the cheerleading hit Bring It On: Fight To The Finish (starring High School Musical’s Christina Milian) and ABC’s college hit Greek: Chapter Three, and one The Twilight Saga: New Moon T-shirt. Plus, if you act now, we’ll throw in a New Moon poster and commemorative card set and — for your own movie-going pleasure — two adult admissions, including refreshments, to Channelside Cinemas 10.

Estimated value: $100. Suggested opening bid: $10

Bid on this item below:

The original Married With Children was a raunchy, cartoon of a sitcom, filled with sexual innuendos and over the top caricatures of sexuality (see Peg and Kelly). The advantage of the parody porn version, not Married with Children XXX, is that it can actually show all the dirty things the jokes reference, like Bud whacking off into a sink or Al looking up women’s skirts at the shoe store.

Al’s job is threatened as a new guy steals all his attractive female clients with the aid of ecstasy pills.  Faced with losing his job, Al employs Kelly to help catch his co-worker with his pants down. Sex and hilarity ensue. Read the rest of this entry »

For news and reviews of this summers biggest releases, be sure to check out CL’s Movies & Television site.

The central mysteries of Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad still baffle critics and audiences to this day. The film is a fixture on most critics’ greatest-movies lists and maintains a strong cult status among cinephiles. Marienbad has just been released as a Criterion Collection special edition DVD & Blu-ray, enabling a new generation of film lovers to ponder how this film could be so loved and be such a cultural touchstone when it can also seem like such a tedious experience.

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Last year’s critical darlings continue their march to DVD and Blu-ray with Frost/Nixon leading the April 21 slate of releases. Ron Howard directed this excellent adaptation of Peter Morgan’s Tony award-winning play recounting the historic television interviews of disgraced former president Richard Nixon by British TV gadfly David Frost. Though Howard does his usual, slick job with the film, it’s the acting that’s the ultimate draw. Frank Langella dominates the film, big and grand as Nixon but still granting the ex-prez a touching humanity he is often denied. (For example: Dan Hedaya’s hilarious but lightweight caricature in Dick.) Michael Sheen plays Frost as an Austin Powers-lite figure that grows into an able foil for Langella’s outsized Nixon, and supporting turns by Kevin Bacon, Oliver Platt and Sam Rockwell are uniformly excellent. The only real weakness to Frost/Nixon is that it plays a little fast and loose with the history, but hey, this is Hollywood after all.

Geeks unite!There’s a new X-Men box set! More after the break …

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Comic fans continue to debate the merits of Frank Miller’s The Spirit, which arrives today in a Blu-ray and two-disc DVD package. They say you never want to follow in the footsteps of a legend, and The Spirit largely proves this point by failing to live up to its predecessor, the much-beloved Sin City. Of course, Sin City had Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino on board, and reveled in darker material and the R rating to go with it. (The kinder/gentler Spirit somehow squeaked out a PG-13 despite violence galore.) But forget the story for a second — as a show-off disc for your hot new home theater set-up, The Spirit is a winner. The films sharp visuals and crisp sound are perfect for basking in the glow of that new 1080P monster you just installed in the family room. Special features include Frank Miller talking about the film on a commentary track and about his work in a “Miller on Miller” segment, Samuel L. Jackson adding his mothafucking voice to a storyboarded alternate ending, and the de rigueur bonus of the moment — a digital copy of the film for use with iTunes or Windows.

More (including a trailer for The Spirit) after the jump …

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NYTimes says movie studies are losing ground in their battle with pirates:

Hollywood may at last be having its Napster moment — struggling against the video version of the digital looting that capsized the music business. Media companies say that piracy — some prefer to call it “digital theft” to emphasize the criminal nature of the act — is an increasingly mainstream pursuit. At the same time, DVD sales, a huge source of revenue for film studios, are sagging. In 2008, DVD shipments dropped to their lowest levels in five years. Executives worry that the economic downturn will persuade more users to watch stolen shows and movies.

“Young people, in particular, conclude that if it’s so easy, it can’t be wrong,” said Richard Cotton, the general counsel for NBC Universal.

It seems strange that the article starts off talking about The Dark Knight, citing it as the most pirated movie of the year. The movie also made its studio an island of money, which begs the question: Is piracy a true threat to a studio’s ability to profit from a movie, or is it merely an expected offshoot of any film’s success, i.e., the better a film does at the box office, the more people try to download it. A film would have to be a hit in the first place to suffer from major piracy, and by that point it’s made a lot of money already, no?

Read more here.

Back in the day, films like Shaft, Foxy Brown and Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song styled funkalicious jazzy soundtracks, tough black heroes and heroines and corrupt white cops and politicians. A new genre was born, both celebrating and exploiting black culture, targeting urban African-American audiences with its style and subject matter. Some of the best of these films have become cult favorites, and have influenced new filmmakers such as Quentin Tarantino, whose Jackie Brown paid explicit homage to the genre he’d grown up on and loved.

Shaft was remade in slick Hollywood style by John Singleton (Boyz ‘n The Hood) in 2000, featuring Samuel Jackson in the title role. But for the original low budget style and campy flair you had to go to the bargain bin DVD versions, until now.

Scott Sanders’ blacksploitation spoof Black Dynamite premieres this year as one of the “Midnight” category films at Sundance. If the trailer below is anything to go by, the funky magic and excitement appears to be back. Black Dynamite looks hilarious and hotter than TNT: Read the rest of this entry »

I had a dream the other night that I was on a transatlantic flight on its way to Africa. I was sitting next to a man in a brown jacket, clown pants and Jesus sandals who kept repeating, “Down we go.” That should have given me a clue to the unfortunate end to my dream, or nightmare, but it didn’t. Suddenly, the no-smoking sign started flashing a blood-red color and the pilot got on the intercom and said something along the lines of, “We are going down, hold on to your fucking hats.” I couldn’t really make out what he said, but I’ve always thought that would be the best way to break the news to the passengers. If we’re going to die, I don’t want to hear, “Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to bring an unfortunate situation to your attention. Blah, blah, blah.” Cut to the chase, man! Anyway, to make a long story short, we plummeted thousands of feet into an island and, magically, I was the only survivor. That is the point when I woke up. And for some batshit crazy reason, the first thing I thought of was an episode of The Office when the employees play Desert Island. This taught me something about myself: Apparently, if I were the sole survivor of a plane crash on a deserted island, the most important thing to me would be what movies I was carrying on me and how I could watch them. So, if that were to happen, and if there were a television and DVD player on this said island, these are the movies I would take… Read the rest of this entry »

First things first: A review of the 2-disc Blu-ray edition of The Dark Knight.

New on DVD or Blu-ray today: Hancock, A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift of All, Fred Claus

Variety reviews The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, starring Brad Pitt and directed by David Fincher. Spoiler: They like it.

William Shatner gives his two cents on the design of the new USS Enterprise. Spoiler: He likes it.

Sarah Jessica Parker reveals that Sex and the City 2 has a story and may be released in 2010. Oh joy, another reason for girls loopy on Cosmos to tell male movie critics to eat shit.

Tim Blake Nelson talks about becoming villain The Leader in an Incredible Hulk sequel. Which doesn’t even have a script yet.

Twilight of Bond: Tween vampire flick overtakes Quantum of Solace at the box office. Hit movies based on young adult novels about girls infatuated with pretty boys who drink blood must surely be a sign of the apocalypse.