I had to tell Jeff Dunham about my planned headline for our brief telephone interview—I mean, it is sorta wacky to interview a ventriloquist over the phone and have him perform some of his stock characters without the pressure of making it look like he’s not mouthing the voice—and he indeed got a kick out of it.

“I guess you were wondering if I would phone it in,” Dunham laughed over the phone. “What’s even worse is when you do a radio spot! When you’re sitting there with the DJs, you’ve gotta bring the dummy and you just don’t know how it’s working over the air. Before I had any notoriety, my poor publicist would try to convince me that it was all still funny.”

Comments (0)

Another holiday season means another release of a complete season of NBC’s Saturday Night Live (as announcer Don Pardo referred to it in the early years before the powers that be dropped the NBC and way before the show was simply to by the call letters SNL). Saturday Night Live: The Complete Fourth Season will be released by Universal on Dec. 9.

The fourth season kicks off with an appearance by then-New York Mayor Ed Koch, who offers a “certificate of merit” to an insulted John Belushi (he wanted a key to...Read More

Comments (2)

Filmmaker Olivier Assayas always has time to talk about Irma Vep, his 1996 film about a French moviemaker (Jean-Pierre Léaud) who embarks on a remake of Louis Feuillade’s 1915 silent serial Les Vampires (which concerns a cabal of Parisian cat thieves). For his leading lady in the epic, he chooses Hong Kong action heroine Maggie Cheung, a distinctly non-French presence, whom he feels can bring a natural depth to the action-flavored production. Zeitgeist is re-issuing Irma Vep as a special edition DVD on December 9.

“There are movies that have their own lives, and...Read More

Comments (0)

For a director known for making some of the most otherworldly movies in the business, Guillermo del Toro is hoping that the extras packed in the Blu-ray release of Hellboy II: The Golden Army debunks many of the myths behind filmmaking.

"It's a way for a lot of young people that have no money or access to a film school to learn the craft of storytelling in films," del Toro told a group of about 200 attendees at the film's DVD-release party in Hollywood last week. "It's like carpentry without the head injuries."

Comments (1)

Okay, there’s no such game or movie out there with this name (not to my knowledge, at least), but I can tell you that actor/filmmaker Saul Rubinek wasn’t playing around when he set out in 2005 to make the independent film Cruel But Necessary, which was just released on DVD by Somerville House/Koch.

“It’s very satisfying to see that the movie is now very real,” director Rubinek told me at a recent screening of the film at New York’s Tribeca Film Center. “All in, the whole movie came in at under $70,000—it was just a matter of all of us putting our forces together for what was a very personal project.”

Comments (0)

Airing on the Sundance Channel in the U.S., Live from Abbey Road is, well, just that: a collection of live musical performances recorded at the famed London studios, the very same facility that has hosted such musical greats as the London Symphony Orchestra, Pink Floyd, U2 and, of course, The Beatles.

Produced by Michael Gleason, the show was issued on DVD or Blu-ray this week—or, rather, highlights from the show as there certainly were a lot to choose from. Included in this Best of Season 1 collection (on the ...Read More

Comments (0)

X-Files: I Want to Believe isn’t filmmaker Chris Carter’s first go-round translating his small-screen cult favorite to the big screen. While 1998’s X-Files: Fight the Future was a mid-series continuation of the TV show’s “mythology,” however, I Want to Believe (due on DVD from Fox on Dec. 2) is an old-fashioned, monster-of-the-week standalone—one that doesn’t require encyclopedic knowledge of the original series to be appreciated.

“It’s a scary movie,” Carter told VB in a recent interview. “The series mythology was a way to explore the relationship between Mulder and Scully--the movie is a continuation of that charact...Read More

Comments (0)

One news item that I didn’t catch yesterday, probably because I was getting waylaid in the Obama-rama media blitz that took over the air- print- and cyber-waves, was an obituary for the wildly-talented and quite-prolific Michael Crichton, who died of cancer on Tuesday at the age of 66.

Most of the obit headlines I read about Crichton describe him as an author of thrillers, which is undoubtedly, what he is best known for. Crichton’s Hollywood-ready novels have yielded more than a dozen films, including The Andromeda Strain (1971), The Terminal Man (1974), Rising Sun (1993), Dis...Read More

Comments (1)

Based upon Blake Morrison’s best-selling memoir of the same name, When Did You Last See Your Father? details the troubled relationship between a father and son--Blake Morrison, the son, portrayed in the film by Colin Firth, and Arthur Morrison, his terminally ill father, played by Jim Broadbent. The film is being issued on DVD today by Sony.

Spanning their decades-long relationship, which are frequently explored via flashbacks to Blake’s teen and young

Comments (0)

No, Universal’s new Waterworld re-issue (the first standard-format one since 1999) does not include a well-deserved making-of doc detailing the history of the legendarily problem-plagued and bloated production. But what it does feature is both the original theatrical version and an extended version that clocks in at some 177 minutes, which is more than 40 minutes longer than the original.

Comments (0)

With last week’s Criterion release of the supremely detached and coolly deadpan “Proletariat Trilogy” from Aki Kaurismäki (comprised of Shadows in Paradise from 1986, Ariel from ‘88 and 1990’s The Match Factory Girl), I get one of my first substantial opportunities to dig into the files and pull out an archival interview that I conducted with the great Finnish auteur back in the fall of 1993. The interview and accompanying article ori...Read More

Comments (0)

Dean McDermott is a 20-year TV veteran, having appeared in such episodic series as Due South, Earth : Final Conflict, Tracker and Power Play before his recent and arguably most popular project, the reality show  Tori & Dean: Inn Love, in which he co-stars with this wife, actress Tori Spelling.

Another of McDermott’s recent endeavors finds him doing an about-face from his regular “reality” and taking on the role of a troublingly humorous drug runner named Blaze in the faith-tinged drama Saving God (available

Comments (0)