Domesticated animals have slowly devoured the genre of family films since the ’90s. Even if a movie centers on a family, there’s always a pet. Pets are funny — they cause shenanigans. I wouldn’t be surprised if the word shenanigans was invented in reaction to an act of pet mischief.
The famous media company Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer has taken on a film adaptation of The Outer Limits. Writers Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton have been hired for the project. The two are perhaps most famous for penning four of the films in the popular Saw franchise, one of which is the supposed final installment Saw 3D. According to Variety, this is a six-figure deal.
With a large number of awards including 9 Cesers, awards from the Cannas and London Film Festivals, a BAFTA and a Oscar nod for Best Foreign Language film, A Prophet is being released onto DVD and Blu-ray this week. Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim) is a 19-year-old French-Algerian man sent to prison for six years. He tries to stay out of trouble, but he is forced to commit the murder of a Muslim prisoner after Cesar (Niels Arestrup) and the Unione Corse (Corsican Mafia) threaten his life.
I wouldn’t say The Ghost Writer, new on DVD and Blu-ray today, deserves comparison to Polanski’s masterpiece Chinatown, but it’s very much in that tradition, only substitute private investigator for biographer. It’s the story of the man who doesn’t know what he’s gotten into until he’s into it and the audience never saw it coming but strangely we knew it all along.
It is a massive week of DVD and Blu-ray releases, with four new releases and nine re-releases, including two new films featuring the most in-demand child actress Chloe Moretz, a number of respected films (such as Blood Simple, The Breakfast Club and Road to Perdition) and three adaptations of novels.
August used to be a terrible month for films, but over the last few years, huge successes have been born here. Comedies in particular have found new life in August. In 2007, Superbad opened to critical acclaim and $33 million. In 2008, Pineapple Express and Tropic Thunder found a solid measure of success.
For the second weekend in a row a children’s film failed to win the top spot at the box office. Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore was the widest release of the weekend
