Wilnervision!

Breaking news from Engadget HD: Paramount’s finally back in!

The Hollywood Reporter has announced that studio will rejoin the Blu-ray format in just three weeks’ time, delivering “Next”, “Bee Movie” and the “Face/Off” special edition to stores on May 20th. After that, it’s “Cloverfield” and “There Will Be Blood” on June 3rd, and then “The Spiderwick Chronicles” arrives day-and-date with its standard DVD release on June 24th.

I’m a little surprised at the choice of titles in that first wave; one would think that Paramount would have gone with a selection of its freshest, newest titles (like, say, “Cloverfield” and “There Will Be Blood”) right off the bat, just to get shoppers’ attention. But then there’s probably so much contractual weirdness revolving around “Bee Movie” that it had to be one of the first discs out of the gate, even if it’s already kinda-sorta been released on HD DVD. Jerry will not be denied.

And I love “Face/Off” as much as the next movie nerd, but … “Next”? Seriously? Does Nicolas Cage have Sumner Redstone’s great-grandchildren in a vault somewhere?

This week’s Sympatico/MSN DVD column salutes Julian Schnabel’s “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”, a film of which I’m very fond — and which, I believe, deserves as broad an audience as I can give it.

I mean, what else was I gonna write about? “The Golden Compass”? Please.

The House Next Door would like to direct your attention to a special edition of the online film magazine Reverse Shot, for which the editors solicited pieces on specific directors who’ve embraced digital filmmaking technology.

“Unfortunately,” the editors lament, “no one picked up the offered gauntlet of The Godfather vs. Youth Without Youth.”

But someone thought long and hard about Robert Zemeckis: Here’s Jeff Reichert’s insightful consideration on the director’s shift from celluloid to binary, using “Cast Away” and “The Polar Express” as points of contrast.

[UPDATE: At Adam’s suggestion, here’s another worthy read from the same issue, as mutual friend and fellow TFCA member Andrew Tracy compares Chris Marker’s still-essential “Sans Soleil” and his more recent “Level Five”.]

Also shocking: While I was putting this post together, HND co-editor Keith Uhlich broke the news that Matt Zoller Seitz, who founded the blog, is leaving print criticism. He’ll still be hanging around, doing stuff online and “making some really short apropos-of-nothing documentaries”, but he will no longer be writing reviews as such.

For those of us who’ve been enjoying his work in the New York Times, among other outlets, this comes as a shock. And also it sucks.

Explanations of a sort are offered in a lengthy conversation between the editors on their site, available here; it’s also available as a podcast.

This is me, bummed.

Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir explains why the announcement that Guillermo del Toro will direct two films based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” is perhaps not the greatest news the entertainment world has ever received.

You may have to endure a brief ad to get to the piece, but it’s worth it.

… hope you weren’t planning on going anywhere today.

If it makes you feel better, here’s my latest Sympatico/MSN movie column, using “Baby Mama” as the jumping-off point to look at some other memorably odd couples.

(It’s taken years, but I’ve finally found a way to give Galvin P. Chow’s brilliant theory of “Fight Club” the mass exposure it deserves.)

It’s not much, I know. But maybe you’ll be inspired to watch a couple of the titles on the list, and that’ll make the time pass a little more quickly.

Assuming your local DVD shop is within walking distance, of course …

Plenty of movies opening this week — including one exceptional drama, one acceptable comedy and the unofficial sequel to one of my favorite films of the 1990s. So let’s get into it, shall we?

“Baby Mama“: Tina Fey and Amy Poehler bring their easy rapport to the big screen in Michael McCullers’ surrogacy comedy; they’re both great, and they’re buoyed by a terrific supporting cast, including an unbilled Steve Martin in the best role he’s had in years, but the movie is a little too conventional; like last month’s “Run Fatboy Run“, you can really tell which chunks of the script were rewritten by the stars, and which ones weren’t.

“Deception”: An innocent businessman is drawn into a web of sex and murrrrder in what looks an awful lot like a straight-to-video erotothriller from the 1990s, except that it stars Ewan McGregor, Hugh Jackman and Michelle Williams and Fox is opening it on several thousand screens. Radheyan is unimpressed.

“The Forgotten Woman”: Bouncing into its commercial run just hours after its Hot Docs premiere, Dilip Mehta’s factual spinoff of his sister’s fictional, Oscar-nominated “Water” looks at the plight of Indian widows who’ve been abandoned by their families. Susan allows that it’s “not a total bummer.”

“Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay”: The new gig lets me be a little more choosy about which movies I watch these days, but it also allows me to hold off on something Kate really wants to see, so we can catch it together when she has the time. Thus, we are going to see this over the weekend. I have, um, high hopes.

“It’s a Free World …“: After something like two decades of making socially conscious indictments of the evils of Western society, Ken Loach finally acknowledges that capitalists are human beings — though not necessarily nice ones — with this deeper-than-usual study of a young London woman who starts an employment agency for illegal workers, and almost immediately finds herself exploiting the crap out of the people she’s supposed to be helping.

“The Singing Revolution“: Estonia’s escape from Soviet occupation is the one fall-of-Communism story that ends without a single drop of blood shed … which is marvelous for the Estonian people, but makes for a pretty dull documentary, a distinction made all the more obvious by the filmmakers’ decision to release this during Hot Docs season. Cue the angry letters.

“Then She Found Me”: Helen Hunt’s directorial debut is, apparently, a middle-aged romance between the star and Colin Firth, compounded by the revelation that Hunt’s character is both trying to get pregnant and dealing with the revelation that her birth mother is Bette Midler and her father was Steve McQueen. Jason makes sense of it.

“The Visitor“: Tom McCarthy, director of “The Station Agent”, returns with another lovely, low-key study of an isolated man pulled back into the larger world by friendship and community; really, you don’t need to know anything more than that. Just go, this weekend, because it’ll be six months before the DVD comes out and you really don’t want to wait that long.

“War, Inc.”: In interviews, John Cusack has claimed his character is “a bit like” Martin Blank, the conflicted assassin he played in “Grosse Pointe Blank”. Horseshit. He is Blank, ten years older and a lot less human, having somehow lost soulmate Minnie Driver along the way and fallen back into the life of a freelance hitman. And this frenzied, clumsily relevant mess is a feeble attempt to superimpose the structure of George Armitage’s marvelous black comedy onto a clumsy satire of modern American warfare. That said, Marisa Tomei is pretty wonderful as a nosy journalist.

And now, I have an interview with Errol Morris to transcribe — if tickets are still available for tomorrow night’s Hot Docs premiere of “Standard Operating Procedure“, you really should grab one — so I shall excuse myself. Catch you tomorrow.

… maybe it’s a good thing that HD DVD is dead.

Just a thought.

If the race to the 2008 Democratic Presidential nomination was a movie franchise, it’d be “Friday the 13th” — just when you think it’s over, it lurches back out of the cultural darkness with another installment. It won’t stay dead.

Taking that analogy to its logical end, Hillary Clinton’s victory last night in the Pennsylvania primary would be “Part V: A New Beginning” — the one that asks the audience to ignore virtually everything that’s been established in the series and tries to start the whole damn thing over again.

See, even with this victory, there’s no almost way Clinton can win the nomination — as Slate’s John Dickerson explains, she’s so far behind on pledged delegates that she’d need to win all the remaining primaries by an overwhelming margin just to pull even with Barack Obama. (She took Pennsylvania by a hair.)

So now Clinton’s strategy is to convince the “superdelegates” — key Democratic players who don’t necessarily have to support their state’s chosen candidate — to vote for her, and push her over the top.

Sure, it’s a total long shot, but it’s the only shot she has, so what the hell, right? Game the system, ignore the stated will of the people — hey, it’s nothing the current administration isn’t doing — and grab that mantle. It’s all about the win. It doesn’t matter how you get there, or what you do to the party along the way.

Obama’s message of putting the old ways behind us and finding a new way to have the political conversation just sounds better and better … and ever more necessary.

My latest Sympatico/MSN DVD column is up, and it’s all about “Cloverfield”. Which, as I have said before, is awesome. And only improves with successive viewings, even on the small screen.

Okay, my screen’s not that small. But you see my point.

Boy, I’m out of it.

We’re behind on “Battlestar Galactica” and “The Office”, the Pope’s visit ended without the visible damnation of George W. Bush and the box-office triumph of “The Forbidden Kingdom” over the weekend doesn’t inspire any reaction in me besides “yeah, people like it when other people kick each other in the face”.

Oh, and Britney Spears will be returning to “How I Met Your Mother”, a casting coup with which I am entirely fine if it gets the show renewed for another season. I am also pretty sure Sarah Chalke is either The Mother, or The Mother’s best friend, so there.

This is cool, though: According to the Associated Press, Eddie Izzard is mulling a career in politics. That could be awesome. Izzard’s arrival on the scene would return spiraling rhetoric and antic madness to the Houses of Parliament — like an Ealing comedy, but with the fate of Europe at stake.

Also, should he attain a Cabinet posting, he would be referred to as “Minister Izzard”, giving the writers of “Doctor Who” endless fodder for alien conspiracy episodes.

Personally, I like my politicians like I like my coffee …

… covered in beeeeeeeeeeeees!!!