My pick of the week is Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep. Our own Jeffrey M. Anderson declared: "There's no question that it belongs in the canon of greatest American movies." As he pointed out, though, the film "has perhaps been more written about and appreciated than actually seen." Now we can all see it. The two-disk special edition DVD from New Yorker Video includes an audio commentary by Burnett and Richard Peña, two versions of Burnett's feature film My Brother's Wedding, four shorts (three rediscovered and one new) and cast reunion video.

Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse , directed by Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper, stirred up controversy when Hickenlooper said that neither he nor Bahr were consulted on the DVD version of their documentary about the making of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now. Jeffrey Wells of Hollywood Elsewhere calls it "one of the best making-of-a-famous-movie docs ever made," but also says that the new DVD from Paramount Home Video "looks like a VHS tape. ... No remastering, tweaking or upgrading ... brilliant!" Sounds like a rental to me. The DVD includes Eleanor Coppola's doc Coda: Thirty Years Later, which will also be screening on cable next month -- see Monika Bartyzel's story for more on that.

Cinematical's James Rocchi saw Gary Hustwit's Helvetica at SXSW and described it as "one of the most intellectually exciting, stimulating, warm-hearted and best-made independent documentaries I've seen in a long time." The DVD includes 95 additional minutes of interviews. Another festival favorite, So Yong Kim's In Between Days (pictured), about a teenage girl dealing with first-time romantic feelings for her "best and only" friend, hits DVD with a stills gallery and a conversation with the director and co-writer/producer Bradley Rust.

In her review Jette Kernion said she was "not a rabid [Werner] Herzog fan, which may actually be the reason why I liked his latest film, Rescue Dawn, as much as I did." The DVD includes commentary by Herzog, deleted scenes, and a "making of" featurette. Luc Besson's Angel-A did not cause much stir when it was released theatrically earlier this year, but I've always been fascinated by the director. The DVD has a "making of" feature.

It's not much of a secret that Francis Ford Coppola did The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II in order to work on more personal films, particularly The Conversation. So, it isn't that surprising to find out neither those two nor The Godfather: Part III are among his personal favorites. According to Page Six, Coppola considers his five best films to be Apocalypse Now, Rumble Fish, The Rain People, his upcoming Youth Without Youth and, obviously, The Conversation, which also happens to be my favorite of his work. This shortlist comes from the next issue of Time magazine, which also includes a continuation of a lengthy two-part profile on the filmmaker. Within the article, Coppola suggests that it's his films that took awhile for critics to appreciate, like Apocalypse, or awhile for audiences to discover, like Rain People, that he prefers.

None of this should upset his fans; they still love The Godfather trilogy, and at least his other monument, Apocalypse, is included. It isn't like he selected Jack or Captain EO. Also in Time is Coppola's clarification of his alleged chiding of Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino and Jack Nicholson, which apparently was taken out of context. He told reporters at the Rome Film Festival, where Youth premiered last month, that his comments in GQ weren't true, that he has "nothing but respect and admiration" for the three actors, who he considers the best in the world, as well as his friends. However, he wouldn't address the original comments specifically for Time's article. Other things that were discussed in the profile include Coppola's next film, Tetro, which will begin shooting in Argentina in February, despite the recent robbery. Youth Without Youth, which sounds a lot better to me since Coppola lumped it with my own favorites of his films, is set to hit U.S. theaters (NYC and L.A.) December 14.

There have been a lot of 'talking head' documentaries in recent years -- where a person or persons sit and talk about an idea: The Aristocrats, Helvetica, The Kid Stays in the Picture. In Murch, David and Edie Ichioka focus their camera, more or less, on film and sound editor Walter Murch as he talks about the craft of editing and the film's he's applied it to. And really, any 'talking head' documentary stands or falls on whether or not the head doing the talking has interesting things to say -- and by that standard, Murch is a movie lover's delight.

Reading Walter Murch's resume brings to mind the line from Belloq about the big whatsit in Raiders: "We are just passing through history, Dr. Jones. But the Ark ... is history." Murch has cut images and shaped sound for Apocalypse Now, The English Patient, The Conversation, Ghost, American Graffiti, THX-1138, The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Godfather Part II, Jarhead. More intriguingly, he's also gone through a significant change in his field, from hand-cut linear editing to digital non-linear cutting -- a change as big as when monks trained in hand-illumination first looked upon Gutenberg's printing press.

But Murch is matter-of-fact about his craft, which is part of the film's appeal. He'll digress -- about the physiology of blinking, about his work technique of editing while standing, about the challenges and opportunities rising out of the films he's worked on -- but it all comes back to the central concern of this film and his work: How do you tell a story?

The Browncoats strike again! The wacky fans of Joss Whedon's Firefly television series, and its feature film spin-off, Serenity, are continuing to show their strength on the internet, as SFX Magazine has declared Serenity the winner of an online poll, in which readers voted for the best science fiction film. This should be a big blow to George Lucas, whose Star Wars had certainly been the sci-fi fan favorite for most of the last three decades. Star Wars came in 2nd place with only 28% of the votes compared to Serenity's 61%. There was also a sad turnout for fans of Spielberg, Verhoeven and Star Trek, none of whom/which made the grade this time around. The winners, in order after Star Wars, are Blade Runner, Planet of the Apes (1968 version, I hope), The Matrix, Alien, Forbidden Planet, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Terminator and Back to the Future.

Lucas and his Star Wars franchise also fared badly in CNN's list of best and worst movie battles. Not only did no Star Wars film make it into the best ten, but two of the films held spots in the worst. The Battle of Endor, with its Ewoks, from Return of the Jedi and the Battle of Naboo, with its Jar-Jar, from The Phantom Menace are grouped alongside awful sequences from King Arthur, Dune and Pearl Harbor. Also among the worst, though, is a sequence from The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which also features two battles in the best of group. Fortunately for Spielberg and Verhoeven, one film each of theirs was also highlighted among the greatest battle scenes of all time, which was topped by the helicopter attack from Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now.

[via Fark.com]

Danny Huston may have a famous Hollywood last name, but not a lot of movie fans know who he is. It would seem, however, that all that is about to change for the 43-year-old actor, whose father is late director John Huston and is half-brother of the lovely Anjelica Huston. In John Hillcoat's Australian western, The Proposition, penned by fellow Aussie Nick Cave, Huston plays a killer outlaw whose brother, played by Guy Pearce, is sent into the Outback to kill him to save their simpleton brother (Richard Wilson) from the gallows. All comparisons to Brando's maniacal Col. Kurtz in Coppola's Apocalypse Now aside, Huston puts his nice-guy looks aside and steps confidently into the role of the film's key character and makes a lot of those inevitable comparisons valid ones. He took the time to talk with Cinematical during a promotional stop in Boston last week.
 

You kids these days. You think you're all cutting edge with your trailer mash-ups, and your Brokeback-ing of Back to the Future, and Jaws, and everything else under the sun. But what do you know, anyway? Why, way back in the 1980s people were doing the same thing - and they had to do it on videotape! In the snow! Uphill, both ways! You punks have it so easy, with your editing software and downloading and whatnot. You don't know what it is to suffer for your art.

Honestly, it's almost impossible to imagine how long it took in 1987 to make a nine-minute mash-up of anything, let alone things as mismatched as Winnie the Pooh and Apocalypse Now, but I'm awfully glad someone was willing to do it. Though the opening is way, way too long and makes you reach desperately for your tracking knob, once Apocalypse Pooh gets going, it's truly incredible. Just go watch it.

[via BoingBoing]