Casablanca Tagged Articles at Cinematical

If you're like me, then you have no shortage of classic films to catch up on, and if you're like me, you can't exactly fork the dough over for every special edition issued for said films (and if you're like me, then you abuse parallel sentence structure like nobody's business). Thankfully, Turner Classic Movies and Warner Bros. have teamed up to offer a good fifteen discs with four movies on each of them for about twenty to twenty-five bucks apiece.

Casablanca, Gigi, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Philadelphia Story, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Searchers, Singin' in the Rain, The Wild Bunch, The Dirty Dozen, The Maltese Falcon and much more -- not too shabby, huh? And here I used to think that Warner Home Video was handiest for Stallone-themed packs (because some of us haven't seen Over the Top, okay?).

Between this and their recent initiative to provide custom-burned copies of archival titles, Warners seems to be doing the most of any studio to preserve their library and make it widely available. For about $20, you could get a movie that few people have, or four movies that you ought to own anyway -- or you could just get several copies of Demolition Man. Priorities, people.

My inbox, Facebook, and Twitter page were semi-flooded with messages of support and condolence when this A L I E N remake gossip hit the wires, and that's because (as anyone in the universe can tell you), it's my #1 favorite film of all time. Mainly because it's just about the perfect horror film, but also because it's a movie that helped plant me on the road of movie freakdom, and for that I'm eternally grateful. Plus it has Sigourney Weaver in her underwear.

So if a film as undeniably flawless as A L I E N can be considered for a remake, it begs the question: What movie won't they remake? Keep in mind that Psycho, Halloween, The Manchurian Candidate, and King Kong have already earned remakes, which tells me that all bets are off. Not even Casablanca, Gone with the Wind, or The Wizard of Oz are safe. Therefore, clearly, remakes are a force of pure evil.

Then again, there IS the old Shakespeare argument, the one that says "Hey, the Bard's plays have been remade over and over for centuries, and surely you wouldn't call Casablanca superior to King Lear, would you?" To which I would respond, "Good point. And no, Casablanca is definitely not superior to King Lear. But A L I E N certainly is."

Once again, we're sending some love to our warped friends over at Worth1000 for their latest brilliant photoshop contest. This time they asked readers to take any celebrity and place them in a different time period. So, for example, above you see WALL-E making a cameo in a Charlie Chaplin movie (my personal favorite). Or, you could take, say, Charlie Chaplin and photoshop him into an image from 2009. Get the idea? Folks were all over the place with this one -- from Marilyn Monroe starring in The House Bunny to Casablanca starring George Clooney, Nicole Kidman and Christian Bale, you'll no doubt find some fascinating imagery in this particular contest, even if some of them are just so very wrong. Check out our favorites in the gallery below, and the rest over at Worth 1000.



[via Superpunch]

Movie fanatics are a tough bunch to shop for because we own everything. The moment it goes on sale, it's in our hot little hands, leaving our families and friends high and dry when it comes to DVDs and box sets. How many people will try to buy you The Dark Knight this Christmas? (Thank goodness for store credit and gift receipts.)

Still, with budgets being tightened all across the country, there's probably a lot of you that have put The Dark Knight on your Christmas list to be purchased by those generous people in your circle. Or maybe there's some movies such as Tropic Thunder or Wall-E that you caught as a rental, and are now desperate to own.

Of course, we aren't all about the new and shiny here. With the format war being decided in favor of Blu-ray, older movies are being reissued every day. Plus, there are always box sets and anthologies making us drool -- the Ultimate Collector's Casablanca or that ridiculously huge Dirty Harry Ultimate Collector's Edition. (It seems the height of arrogance that I Am Legend has a similar release this year, doesn't it?)

So, why not share the DVD you hope to find under your tree this Christmas? While you're at it, why not tell us which DVD releases you think were the best of the year? The Tropic Thunder DVD was a universal favorite here at Cinematical, but The Dark Knight's bare bones release left us disappointed. Enough responses, and we'll put together a poll to decide the question once and for all.

White Dog
Samuel Fuller's follow-up to The Big Red One was shelved by Paramount Pictures before its scheduled release in 1982 because of fears that its premise -- a white dog has been trained to attack black people -- would stir up more controversy than box office. Fuller was understandably outraged; in his autobiography, A Third Face, he wrote: "The studio has used me as a scapegoat for their lack of determination and courage." The film, co-written by Curtis Hanson (LA Confidential), with a score by the legendary Ennio Morricone, later received acclaim when it was released in Europe but never received a home video release in the US and has rarely been seen here. Kristy McNichol plays an actress who adopts the dog; Paul Winfield is as an anthropologist who tries to reverse the training. The Criterion Collection DVD includes a featurette with Hanson, producer Jon Davison, and Fuller's widow, plus a print interview with the dog trainer and essays by J. Hoberman and Armond White. I'm buying, but even if you're not a huge fan of Samuel Fuller, you'd want to check it out. Rent it.

Step Brothers
Combining Will Farrell, John C. Reilly, Richard Jenkins, and Mary Steenburgen under one roof, Step Brothers mines familiar territory with sharp timing and plenty of belly laughs. Mine is, admittedly, a distinctly minority opinion. Available on DVD (single-disc rated, single-disc unrated, two-disc unrated) and Blu-ray, with an audio commentary by Farrell, Reilly, director Adam McKay, and a score by Jon Brion. Other features include deleted scenes and alternate takes, a gag reel, 'making of,' and a couple of gag featurettes. Rent it.

Much more on Wanted, The X-Files: I Want to Believe, and The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian after the jump, plus Indies on DVD, Blu-ray Picks, and Collector's Corner.

The original title of the post over on The Toy Zone is '20 Classic Films Recreated in LEGO', but when you have stuff like Serenity, The Ring, The Life Aquatic and Men in Black -- well, do we really consider those to be classic films? I sure don't, but that doesn't mean they're bad movies ... just not classics. Casablanca, Indiana Jones, Star Wars, Alien, 2001: A Space Odyssey ... I give you those. But the rest? Eh. Nevertheless, they have up scenes from 20 "popular" films recreated in LEGO and some of them are pretty damn cool -- like the one above which recreates one of the opening scenes from Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.

We snagged a few of our favorites for the gallery below, so check them out and let us know which ones you like the best. Personally, for me it's a tie between Star Wars, Alien, Casablanca and The Ring (I never thought a LEGO image would creep me out, but there you have it -- creepy indeed). Enjoy.

Can everyone guess where I am right now, and what I'm doing? I'm very thankful that the New Orleans airport has free wireless available while I wait for an airplane crew to show up for my flight, so I can return to sunny Austin. In the meantime, I have a laptop and Internet access and a stack of DVDs to watch. I am prepared. I can watch movies indefinitely if necessary, especially if I can get Hulu or Netflix's Watch Instantly cranked up.

I have a few suggestions for packing / purchasing / (legally) downloading movies to watch on your laptop or other device in an airport or on a plane. Pick at least one or two movies that are old familiar favorites. Sometimes when you're stuck in a terminal with poor food choices, a "comfort movie" can be your very best friend. In addition, I find it difficult to listen clearly to movies on an airplane or even in a noisy terminal (you don't want the sound too loud, so you can hear updates on your flight's delay), so it's best to pick something where you already know what's going on and don't need to catch every last nuance of dialogue. Big goofy action films and physical comedies have an advantage over talkier films where you have to pay attention.

In compiling this list of specific recommendations, I tried to avoid the overwhelmingly obvious choices for watching movies in airports -- personally, I don't want to watch disaster films at times like this, or even spoofs of disaster films like that timeless comedy Airplane. The Terminal and Snakes on a Plane also a little too close for comfort. I thought instead of lighter fare, with scenes that emphasized the fantasy world of airline travel, good or bad, and the magic of escapism. Next time, I'm tucking a few of these in my laptop bag myself.

...and by SEs I mean big, fat, loaded mega-special editions of the studio's most popular stuff. And when WB delivers a Special Edition, they generally don't mess around. (Unlike some home video distributors *koff Universal* who throw the SE term around willy-nilly.) Just a quick scan through my mega-awesome DVD collection reveals WB SEs like Goodfellas, Dirty Harry, Amadeus, The Shawshank Redemption, Blade Runner, Superman, and a whole bunch more. If there's a catalog title you love, you should pray it gets the WB 2-disc SE treatment.

And a bunch more are on the way! According to Video Business, WB plans to double its SE output moving forward, and while we don't have any specs just yet, we do know that the following titles will be available (in fancy form) later this year: 300 (yes already, even though I thought the first 2-discer was pretty damn excellent), Casablanca (also again, but if any film deserves it...), A Christmas Story (cool!), JFK (a movie I need to see again), and I Am Legend. Come to think of it, all five of these movies already have Special Edition releases! These new discs better be pretty dang impressive.

Also on the way: The Peanuts Complete Holiday Collection. Which I definitely will own.

There are a few classic films that I simply refused to rent while growing up, specifically for the reason that I knew I should see them for the first time on a big screen. Of these, I managed to see both 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner in a theater, while others, such as Lawrence of Arabia and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, were on television too often to ignore them on the small screen first. One film that I'm still dying to see in a theater is Terrence Malick's Badlands. A few years ago I actually went to a special screening of the film in Connecticut, but it was disappointingly (understatement) projected from a DVD copy. Then two months ago it played one show at NYC's IFC Center, but I had to miss it for another engagement.

Last week Entertainment Weekly presented an article/photo gallery titled "23 Movies You'd Like to See on the Big Screen," which lists these kinds of films (there's actually many more than 23 cited), most of which should ONLY be seen on the big screen, as they were originally meant to be. The list includes obvious epic choices like 2001, Lawrence of Arabia, Gone With the Wind, The Greatest Show on Earth and The Ten Commandments, as well as other classics, like Malick's Days of Heaven, Casablanca, Once Upon a Time in the West, Star Wars, High Society, Halloween, Singin' in the Rain, To Kill a Mockingbird, Psycho, Oklahoma!, The Music Man, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, The Searchers, Stagecoach and The French Connection.

• Joy Page (1924-2008) - Actress who played the young newlywed "Annina Brandel" in Casablanca. In the film, she's about to desperately prostitute herself for exit Visas, for her husband and herself, when Rick (Bogie) steps in and fixes a roulette wheel so the husband is able to win the Visas instead. She also appears in Kismet, Bullfighter and the Lady and the William Castle-directed western Conquest of Cochise. She was the daughter of silent film star Don Alvarado and the step-daughter of WB chief Jack L. Warner. She died of complications from a stroke and pneumonia April 18, in Los Angeles. (Variety)

• Tristram Cary (1925-2008) - Composer and electronic musician best known for penning the theme to TV's Doctor Who. He also scored The Ladykillers (the 1955 original), Quartermass and the Pit and the 1971 horror film Blood from the Mummy's Tomb and did sound effects for the 1986 animated feature When the Wind Blows and 1967's Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush. A pioneer of electronic music, he co-designed a synthesizer that was used by Pink Floyd, The Who and Roxy Music. He died April 24 in Adelaide, Australia. (Telegraph)