Just wanted to share the list of winners from the 2009 DVD Critics Choice Awards! This is the Fifth Annual DVD Critics Awards, which honors the top DVD and Blu-ray Disc titles from 2008. More than 130 entries were judged by a panel of critics and journalists. Submitted titles also were placed in eight special categories for the consumer vote, bringing the total number of awards to 21.
Warner Home Video’s The Dark Knight won Best Theatrical Title, plus the consumer categories Best Action Title, Best Superhero Title and Consumer Favorite.
Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment’s Pixar release Wall-E also fared well, winning for Best Animated Title and taking the consumer vote for Best Sci-Fi Title.
In all, Warner won five awards, while sister company HBO took three. Disney earned four awards.
Here are the awards:
2009 DVD Critics Award Winners:
Title of the Year: The Sopranos: The Complete Series, HBO
Best Theatrical Title: The Dark Knight, Warner
Best TV DVD: Mad Men: Season One, Lionsgate
Best Classic/Catalog Title: The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration Gift Set, Paramount
Best Collection/Multidisc Set: The Sopranos: The Complete Series, HBO
Best Nonfiction Title: Young @ Heart, 20th Century Fox
Best Animation Title: Wall-E, Walt Disney Studios
Best Kidvid Title: Tinker Bell, Walt Disney Studios
Best Nontheatrical Title: Stargate: Continuum, Fox/MGM
Best Extended Cut/Director’s Cut: Step Brothers, Sony Pictures
Best Extras: Hellboy II: The Golden Army, Universal Studios
Best Packaging: Masters of Horror: Season Two, Anchor Bay
Best Blu-ray Disc: Planet of the Apes: 40-Year Evolution, 20th Century Fox
Consumer’s Choice Categories
Consumer Favorite DVD/Blu-ray Release: The Dark Knight, Warner
Funniest DVD/Blu-ray: Robot Chicken: Star Wars, Warner
Best Action Title: The Dark Knight, Warner
Best Sci-Fi Title: Wall-E, Walt Disney Studios
Best Superhero Title: The Dark Knight, Warner
Best Western Title: 3:10 to Yuma, Lionsgate
Best Period Piece: Band of Brothers (Blu-ray), HBO
Best Single Extra: The Making-Of Documentary on Sleeping Beauty: Platinum Edition, Walt Disney Studios
Be sure to check them out at your favorite online or brick-and-mortar retailer if you missed them last year!
Let’s start by saying I’m a jaded horror movie watcher. I prefer plot and story to thrills, special effects to blood and gore, and strong themes to strong screams. I tend to find horror movies funny rather than scary. However, when the trailers for The Unborn (2009) began airing on television before its release, I have to say they made me curious about the film.
David S. Goyer has been involved with a number of my recent favorite movies as a writer or director, including The Dark Knight and Batman Begins as well as the Blade trilogy. And Gary Oldman has been in some of my favorite movies, including The Fifth Element, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and The Professional as well as the recent Batman movies. He typically plays crazy characters well, but has been more subdued in recent roles.
So I thought The Unborn looked like a winner — a great writer, a great actor, and apparent homages (at least from the trailers) to The Exorcist and The Omen. I never saw the film in the theater, but I added it to my list of movies to check out when it got to DVD.
At a very high level, The Unborn boils down to a simple formula. Twins + Nazi Occult Experiments + Dybbuk = The Unborn. And I think if they’d stuck to that formula, this might have been an ok movie. As it turned out however, it peters out about 2/3 of the way through. The first hour builds the suspense just fine, with a few scares thrown in for good measure.
Casey Beldon’s (Odette Yustman looking a lot like Megan Fox) life begins to unravel as she starts seeing, hearing, and experiencing strange visions of a creepy young boy. As we learn more, we find out that her mother, Janet (Carla Gugino), killed herself when Casey was young. Casey lives with her father (James Remar), who really only appears in perhaps 3 scenes and is evidently away on business more often than not, leaving Casey at home to fend for herself against the forces of evil.
As the film progresses, we learn that while in her mother’s womb, Casey had a twin who was strangled by an umbilical cord. This comes to light after the color of one of her eyes begins to change, which is ostensibly a symptom of a genetic condition that often aflicts twins.
And we meet Casey’s grandmother (Jane Alexander as Sofi Kozma), whom Casey had never met before. Granny was a prisoner at Auschwitz during World War II, and was the subject of strange Nazi occult science experiments along with her brother. As a consequence of those experiments, her brother died, but came back as a dybbuk, an evil spirit who was merely inhabiting her brother’s body. Granny tells Casey to find Rabbi Sendak (Gary Oldman), who might be able to perform a Jewish exorcism to get rid of the evil spirit that’s now plagued the family through three generations.
All along the way (as you might expect in a horror movie about evil spirits), poor Casey sees things, hallucinates, and generally has a bad time of things.
It’s about an hour into the picture when things go weird for me. Rabbi Sendak enlists the aid of Arthur Wyndham (Idris Elba), a Christian priest who has done research into exorcisms. When Wyndham meets Casey and her boyfriend Mark (Cam Gigandet), he asks for their ids and signatures on a legal consent form. After all the other weird things experienced by Casey and Mark, the Rabbi, Casey’s grandmother, and the nearly 100 cops and other officials at the many crime scenes throughout the film, why are they asking for id now? Just in case something goes wrong… Yeah, right.
Once they sign the paperwork, it’s as though the dybbuk sees an opportunity to pretty much kill everyone it encounters in bizarre, violent ways. And at the end, well I won’t spoil it. But at the end they finally return to the spooky formula that might have worked if they’d stuck with it all the way through.
The Unborn isn’t a bad horror movie. There were a few good startles here and there, the evil was suitably evil, and the creatures suitably creepy. But I felt as though all the actors over 25 might have been sleepwalking through their parts. Oldman even looked bored through a few of the “scary” parts.
I watched the “Unrated” version of the film, which adds one minute to the running time of the film. I wasn’t able to determine which scenes were added, but I suspect that they added a few extra shots of Yustman’s young, scantily clad body. There’s little nudity in the film, and it was handled respectfully. But there can’t have been much else added in that extra minute. Both versions, the theatrical and the unrated, are on the DVD for your viewing pleasure.
Beyond the theatrical and unrated versions of the film, the only extras are a few trailers and a number of deleted scenes. None of the deleted scenes really added much to the movie, so I don’t think you’ll miss much there.
Overall, The Unborn was just ok. If you’re looking for a horror movie about evil spirits, possession, and exorcisms – I’d have to tell you to go to the classics like The Exorcist and The Omen. Even now after all these years, those are still the baseline for a good movie in this genre. Check them out at your local rental store or favorite retailer, but unless you need to see more of Yustman’s rear end I’d skip this one. (For a different take on The Unborn, check out Luigi Bastardo’s review of the Blu-ray version here.)
–Fitz
p.s. Click below to pick up The Unborn and other films at Amazon:
In 1984, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Biehn, and Linda Hamilton starred in Terminator, which introduced us to the spectre of a dark future. On Judgement Day, Cybernet, an artificially aware computer, starts a nuclear war. From that day forward, the machines ruled the earth with only a few ragtag resistance groups fighting back.
In 2029, the machines send back a “Terminator” (Schwarzenegger) – a cyborg – to kill the mother of John Connor, leader of the resistance mounting against the machines. Sarah Connor (Hamilton) is saved by Kyle Reese (Biehn), a soldier sent back to stop the Terminator. During their fight for survival against the Terminator, they fall in love and through that union, John Connor is conceived.
Directed by James Cameron, Terminator was a science-fiction stalker movie that caught moviegoers by surprise and gained worldwide notice.
In 1991, the fight against the machines continued with Terminator 2: Judgement Day. This time, a Terminator (Schwarzenegger) is sent back to protect a young John Connor (Edward Furlong). A second, more advanced Terminator (Robert Patrick), is sent back to kill John. John and his protector work together to get Sarah Connor (Hamilton) out of a mental hospital and then the trio work to stop the new, shapeshifting cyborg from killing John.
As with any good movie idea, the second movie spawned a third and in 2003 we saw Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. Continuing the story, we moved further along the Terminator timeline to the days when Cybernet became self-aware and triggered nuclear holocaust. Along the way, we meet Kate Brewster (Claire Danes), John’s future wife, and a more grown-up John Connor (Nick Stahl).
That brings us to May 2009, when Terminator Salvation began hitting theaters around the world. Writers John Brancato and Michael Ferris and director McG aimed to reboot the Terminator franchise and fill in the time between Judgement Day and when Kyle Reese is sent back in time to protect an unknowing Sarah Connor from the machines.
Tara Bennett’s book, Terminator Salvation: The Official Movie Companion, provides a closer look at the process that went into making Terminator Salvation, from pre-production through to production design, costume design, actors, stunts, cinematography and visual effects.
The book goes into a ton of detail about each phase of production, providing a wide variety of pictures and text to inform the reader about decisions, early designs, and discussions with cast and crew. Some of the imagery is striking, including an image of four different Terminator endoskeletons, from the initial T-600 of the first movie through to the time of Terminator Salvation. The many storyboards scattered throughout the book are also very helpful as you see the progression from early thoughts to finished product.
The production design chapters included many, many pictures from early phases of the movie. Production artists created what must have been 100s of different paintings depicting different scenes and how they might look. Comparing those early images to what they looked like in the final product was very cool.
Christian Bale as John Connor in this incarnation was a bold choice by McG. Bale has a history of devoting himself fully to projects like American Psycho, The Machinist, Rescue Dawn and both Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. He works very hard at each role, investing himself physically and mentally at each phase of production. This movie was no different. As McG says in the book, “This is the story of the becoming of John Connor.” Bale took that seriously and made sure Connor started at one point in his development and came out the leader of the Resistance he would become.
Sam Worthington is a relative newcomer to Hollywood, but he was picked for James Cameron’s upcoming film – Avatar – and was approached by McG to become Marcus Wright, a core character in Terminator Salvation. McG looked hard “who can stand up to Christian Bale, face-to-face, and not flinch.” And Worthington fit the bill. Originally a brick-layer in Western Australia, Worthington has a working-class quality that comes across in his acting.
And the rest of the book dives deeply into constructing the many different Terminator models seen in the film, working with cast and crew on this project, and so on. Definitely a ton of detail to make you appreciate the time, energy, and skill that goes into making a film of this scope.
If you liked the film, this is a great book to learn more about how it was made. But even if you didn’t like Terminator Salvation, I’d recommend you take a look at the Terminator Salvation: The Official Movie Companion just to understand how much work went into the film. It’s obvious from the book that everyone was quite passionate about the project – not only as a huge film production in the present, but to make sure that it lived up to the legacy of the previous Terminator films.
Be sure to pick up a copy of Terminator Salvation: The Official Movie Companion at your favorite online or local brick-and-mortar bookseller!
Just thought I’d pass along congrats to all the Oscar winners last night. It’s great to see Heath Ledger get posthumous appreciation for his amazing acting work on The Dark Knight.
Lastly, I was happy to see Sean Penn and WALL-E get some much deserved love as well, even with all the pre-Oscar protests Penn had to deal with for his role in Milk.
Congrats to all and I hope next year’s field of nominees is just as strong as this year’s — only better!
Saw this today on TechCrunch and thought it was worth noting. A new site called ClerkDogs.com is taking a Pandora-like approach to making movie recommendations.
ClerkDogs.com "Batman Begins" Recommendation
This cool tool is just coming out of beta tomorrow but you can already sign up. Like Pandora, the ClerkDogs guys have a way of classifying movies that allows you to see how one movie is related to others.
In the example I’ve included here, I put in “Batman Begins” to see what came up. Some of them I was expecting (pretty much all the superheroes), but I was surprised to see Casino Royale and Dark City (both excellent flicks) in the list.
The service is just getting going, so don’t be surprised if there aren’t a ton of recommendations for everything you’re looking for. But I have a feeling that as it continues to operate, we’re going to see this grow and grow with better and better recommendations.
So if you’re looking for some interesting movies and like the Pandora approach to recommendations, be sure to check out ClerkDogs! (Keep in mind as it leaves beta tomorrow, it’ll be a madhouse to sign up for.)
–Fitz
p.s. Pick up Casino Royale, Dark City, The Dark Knight, or Batman Begins at Amazon if you’re interested:
I don’t know if I’m late to the party or not, but I stumbled on this great hilarious site with abridged scripts to some of your recent faves (or least faves).
It’s called the Editing Room, written by Rod Hilton, who writes for Total Film magazine and does the abridged scripts for them. And his dry wit just leaps off the page and slaps you (or maybe just me) upside the head. Gotta love it when you find something like that.
His latest script is for The Dark Knight, but one of the gems I found was from Iron Man. And I’ll just quote one particular passage and let you read the rest (it’s worth it)…
“… Eventually he gets back to AMERICA, which instantly makes everything BETTER.
JEFF BRIDGES
Robert! Welcome back. As your partner and obvious eventual bad guy, I was extremely worried about you. Tell me what you used to escape and if we can sell it.
ROBERT DOWNEY JR
Later. First, I need a delicious, juicy, American hamburger! Failing that, one of Burger King’s tasteless, squashed heaps of grade D meat and soggy bread will do fine.
So if you’re feeling like a chuckle… Check it out. If you like movies or just ripping on them, this sites for you! (I’ll be adding it to my list of links now… )
First of all, let me say that I loved the first Mummy movie. And then came the second, and I didn’t love it at all. (CGI Scorpion Kings aside, it was a bad film with little redeeming value.) And now Rob Cohen has picked up for Stephen Sommers and I have to wonder… why?
Rating:
If your favorite scene of a movie involves a group of CGI Yeti kicking a field goal with a Chinese soldier for the ball… something’s wrong.
Problem #1 – Luke Ford as Alex O’Connell. How in the heck could Rick (Brendan Fraser, whom I like) and Evie O’Connell have a son in College? Huh?
Problem #2 – Maria Bello as Evelyn O’Connell. I like Bello, but nobody can really replace Rachel Weisz, and she was wise (bad pun) to leave the franchise.
Problem #3 – There were NO mummies in this film!!!
Problem #4 – There is NO problem 4.
Problem #5 – There were NO mummies
If you’re in the mood for a good mummy movie, watch the first in this series. Or read Anne Rice’s Ramses the Damned. But skip this one unless you’re desperate, it’s on television, and it’s the only thing on.
Ok, really it’s not that bad. But it’s not very good either. I’d have cut about half of this movie out from the get-go.
Things I liked:
The Yetis. Yes, they’re kind of cheesy, but they were one of my favorite parts of the film.
The Battle at the Great Wall of China at the end. It dragged a bit, but at least it included the undead and some interesting scenes. (I really liked the planes flying across and mowing down the statue army…)
And Shangri-la. Whomever did the set painting for that scene did a great job. I would’ve moved there, but probably not have put a casino there like Jonathan was thinking of doing…
Thinks I didn’t like? Wow…
Father and son comparing gun cabinets was really forced. I got what they were after, but damn if they didn’t beat you over the head with it.
Jet Li’s character isn’t a mummy… Why the heck does this movie have “The Mummy” in the title?
Too many explosions (for little effect), faces melting, and statues being broken. Why the high destructive count?
Little plot questions like… Why did the Emperor’s statue army have to go beyond the Great Wall to turn immortal? All the Emperor had to do was take a bath… Couldn’t he have just marched them all up there for bath day?
Anyway… I’m giving this movie 2/4. It was ok. It wasn’t great. It wasn’t horrible. But it was a waste of time about half the movie. Save your money and rent it if you’re that interested…
Scary part is they’re talking about another Mummy film already — one in Peru. Please don’t do it. (The scarier thought is that this movie made $45 million in its first weekend and so did The Dark Knight. Ugly mummies, Batman!)
So today I heard that Shannon Doherty has just been confirmed as part of the new Beverly Hills 90210 remake. Tori Spelling was already involved I believe. And I think Jennie Garth and the guy who ran the “Peach Pit” are also in this new spin-off. (See more here at ComingSoon.net.)
And 99% of the other shows seem to be variations on a theme. (The exception in my mind was Big Bang Theory.)
Hollywood too has had a long stretch of remaking older movies. And yes, we seem to go through this phase now and then. But who really needs to see an updated version of Short Circuit? Come on!
Where are the original scripts? Chris Nolan did Memento a few years ago, and that cemented his entry into the world of unique film makers. He’s continued making bold and amazing films with Batman Begins, The Prestige, and now The Dark Knight. M. Night Shymalan did that quite a while ago with the Sixth Sense and has fallen further and further into mediocre outings.
Who’s writing unique and challenging screenplays and television scripts? Anybody?
Even Guillermo del Toro is starting to fall into that trap… The Hobbit just follows on the heels of the Lord of the Rings… Let’s just hope that he keeps making unique films like Pan’s Labyrinth.
Is anyone else disturbed by this trend that seems to be getting much much worse?
Anybody? Anybody? Bueller? Bueller? (Btw… if they remake Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, I know the world is coming to an end.)
And what’s funny to me is I was already on the fence about it vs. Get Smart. (You can see my fence sitting here.) But Get Smart is getting mixed press in a number of places. So I’m going to see Get Smart tomorrow sometime. (Sizziling Popcorn got a sneak peek and they say to see Get Smart. Your Movie Stuff didn’t really like Get Smart and says to rent it…)
Even funnier to me is that each time I see a WALL*E preview, I get more and more excited to see this next Pixar movie. I even noticed today that Pixar has put part of the short feature to precede WALL*E up on the internet for folks to see, and it’s fun! (Slash Film has the video on their site here.)
So… I’ll see Get Smart and WALL*E and we’ll see how these movies stack up against the rest of the summer fare!
Nothing is stopping my anticipation for Hellboy 2 and The Dark Knight however… July is going to be a great month for movies, just like May was.
The Dark Knight, the sequel to Batman Begins comes out July 18, 2008. I’m very geeked up about this film. It’s one of four tentpoles in my summer of movies… Iron Man, Indy IV, Hellboy 2, and The Dark Knight. Everything else will fall somewhere beneath the tent made by these four poles IMHO.
I knew that it was going to be serious. Take the serious tone of the origin movie Batman Begins and ratchet it up a few notches with the same cast and director. Toss in some seriously insane villains. And hope you don’t end up with a horrible mess like Batman Forever. I think with Chris Nolan in the director’s chair, this will be nothing like the horrible mess that was the last mixed up multi-villain Batman movie.
And as if they wanted to just ratchet it up a bit more, I just saw this post on Ain’t It Cool News today.
Harvey Dent as Two Face. He’s an iconic Batman baddie. Friend of Bruce Wayne changed into a psychopath by a freak accident. Aaron Eckhart plays Harvey in this movie and if this face is even a bit true to what we’ll see on screen after Dent’s accident, I’m even more intrigued. This is hideous. (See it after the break.) (more…)
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