Author: Robert Greenberger

While growing up, I among the last generation that got to watch classic black and white and early color horror films day and night. Before talk and game shows became cheap fare, New York stations would run movies before dinner and throughout the evening. Some were cheesy, even to my pre-adolescent eyes, but others were just downright scary. Among the latter was the effectively creepy The Fly. 20^th Century Home Entertainment has just released this beloved classic on Blu-ray and it has been nicely transferred to enthrall a new generation.

Of course, many of the readers here probably only know the fun and weird remake by David Cronenberg, which does nicely stand on its own, but the original is well worth a loo, too.

Released in 1958, it was one of Fox’s truly great horror/sci-fi offerings after decades of inferior efforts. The film is based on the forgotten George Langelaan short story of the same name which first appeared in the June 1957 edition of Playboy. Fox quickly snapped up the rights and assigned the script chores to Shogun’s James Clavell. Despite its brevity, he whittled away elements of the story and focused squarely on the doomed Andre (David Hedison, pre-Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea), a scientist cursed by his own lab work.

Told partly in flashback, the movie has Helene Delambre (Patricia Owens) recount how and why she killed her husband Andre as her confession to her brother- in- law Francois (Vincent Price) and Inspector Charas (Herbert Marshall). Essentially, Andre was building a transporter device and of course decided to test it on himself without any assistance or witnesses. As he stepped into the beam, an innocent fly also entered the streaming energy and, well, things happened.

There’s a sense of creeping menace as the film slowly unfolds its tale even though it somewhat telegraphs that clearly some body parts got mixed up. But it also builds up a nice sense of tension until the big reveal, when the cloth covering is removed and we see the giant fly head where Hedison’s handsome face should be. It’s a measured approach, letting things build without a lot of melodrama or screeching violins. We’re sold on believing this tale thanks to Owens’ strong performance with a nice turn from Price. Hedison is underrated here considering how much he has to do without speaking or having his face shown.

Of course, that’s saved for the great final shot, which horrified me as a kid and still brings backs strong memories.

Fox gets credits for the fine transfer of this CinemaScope classic, retaining some of the color and sprucing up the rest. The sound is similarly strong, letting the sound effects come through nicely. The new edition also comes with an interesting and amusing Commentary with Actor David Hedison and Film Historian David Del Valle. There’s a repeat of Biography: Vincent Price from 1997 (44:03); Fly Trap: Catching a Classic (11:30), which explores not only this but the two unnecessary sequels; Fox Movietone News (:54) recapping the film’s premiere in San Francisco; and, the original Theatrical Trailer (1:59)

There was tremendous excitement over Lost’s Damon Lindelof making his Marvel debut with the Ultimate Wolverine vs. Ultimate Hulk miniseries. The writer, at the height of his popularity, was paired with Leinil Francis Yu so anticipation was running rampant. The first issue arrived and there, the behemoth literally tore the Canadian mutant in half – something we’d never seen before. The second issue ratcheted things up and then….nothing. At least not for threel years and by the time we got the final issues in 2009, few cared. The momentum and excitement was long gone and could not be recaptured.

Marvel Knights’ Motion Comics saw the potential here, and adapted the story into a multi-part serial totaling about 1:10 and for a change, did a good job casting well-matched vocal performers for the two lead roles.

The entire story is now collected on Shout! Factory’s release, Ultimate Wolverine vs. Hulk, this Tuesday. Picking up on previous threads, Bruce Banner and alter-ego was hiding out in Tibet letting the world think him dead. Instead, uber-suspicious Nick Fury knows better and hires Wolverine to go finish him off.

They talk, they fight, they dream and we get various cameos from the rest of the Ultimates universe. Perhaps the most significant event to come out of this fairly thin story was the introduction of Jennifer Walters, a scientist work on the Super-Soldier research and becoming that world’s She-Hulk.

Yu’s artwork is never short of gorgeous and he fits in nicely with the more realistic-looking Ultimates world, coupled with Dave McCaig’s excellent color art. Unfortunately, the Motion Comics approach does their work a disservice. If anything, the movements are jerkier than previous productions and the actions are stiff or off-kilter. The concept does a good job with special effects and transitions but when you’re asking two-dimension artwork to try and gain motion, things are limited. The entire concept of Motion Comics appears to have come and gone, especially with digital productions, such as Madefire’s offerings, introducing a new generation of animated fare.

The sole bonus feature is a 7:26 look back from Supervising Producer Kalia Cheng and Yu, which is interesting but far from informative.

The first wave of anime to arrive in America was usually found in syndication, filler in the mornings and afternoons for the off-network stations in the New York area. It all started with Astro Boy but was quickly followed by Eighth Man and Gigantor, Kimba the White Lion to the Amazing Three. And then there was Marine Boy, the first of the color animated series to be broadcast in America. In his native Japan, the name translated to Undersea Boy Marine and was therefore Americanized.

Produced by Minoru Adachi and Japan Tele-Cartoons, there were 78 episodes in total and the first season or 26 episodes, have now been collected by Warner Archive, which is fitting since Warner was the company to distribute the series back in the 1960s.

Sometime in the future, there lived a boy, maybe 15, remarkable enough to serve as a full-fledged agent of the Ocean Patrol. Their mission was to troll the seven seas and ensuring that the undersea ranching, mineral and oil exploitation, research, and undersea habitats were safe. With all this prosperity above and below the surface, there seemed to be an unending supply of single-minded villains out to seize control of some portion of this prosperity for themselves.

Thankfully, Dr. Mariner and Professor Fumble were on hand to grow and equip the OP with the gear they needed to keep fish and man safe. Various-sized craft were dispatched but the series focused on the P-1, manned by the comedic duo of Bolton and Piper along with the title character. Marine Boy is an all-around all-star, the perfect athlete, swimmer, tactician, etc. He was beloved by all, including sea life in the form of the friendly dolphin Splasher. Since he insists on heading into action, he’s been equipped with a special wetsuit that allows him to withstand the varying pressure changes underwater along with a ring that can whistle for dolphins and the frequently-used oxy-gum. Odd for the water, but he uses a boomerang with deadly accuracy.

He’s also accompanied by Neptina, a slightly younger girl who just happens to be a mermaid. Little was revealed about her race but she wears a pearl around her neck with a wide array of convenient magical powers.

The vocal work is weak, largely because Corinne Orr, best recognized as Speed Racer’s Trixie, performs the roles of Marine Boy, Neptina and Cli Cli, a small boy who idolized Marine Boy. Sharp-eared fans will recognize the tones of Jack Grimes, Peter Fernandez, and Jack Curtis.

The stories are all long before ecological issues were common so were far more typical adventures such as investigating what happened at drilling Satellite Station 23 or the self-proclaimed Emperor of the Pacific Empire. There’s a certain simple charm to them even if the criminal mastermind of the week grew a little tiring.

Growing up, I never warmed to the show although my siblings liked it well enough. It was certainly engaging enough back in the day and was clearly a stepping stone to the American market and other projects.

The Hanna-Barbera machine was showing its age by the 1970s. After producing countless hours of programming for the three networks’ Saturday morning schedules, it was clear that the creative juices were drying up. They were also struggling to come with creative variations on the talking animals theme, especially as the hand-wringing parents were getting increasingly vocal about violence depicted on programming intended for impressionable children.

All of which may well explain the not-terribly-original Help…It’s the Hair Bear Bunch series that ran on CBS from 1971-1974 and has been only sporadically seen since. Still, that has not stopped Warner Archive from collecting the complete series and releasing it in a three-disc set.

All the veteran animators, writers, and voice artists gave us a professionally looking and sounding series. It just wasn’t very original or funny or topical. The closest we get is Hair Bear, with his afro, at a time when afros were all the rage. The bears — Hair Bear, Bubi Bear, and Square Bear — operated out of a then- modern looking den with real beds, plus there was a laboratory, television, refrigerator, and even a pizza maker. Like Hogan’s Heroes, the comfortable surroundings were easily transformed back into their prison surroundings. Oddest of all, they used an invisible motorcycle,

The overall premise to the series was that the Bears were trying to escape the Wonderland Zoo or have some sort of adventure. Opposing their plans, of course, is the zoo’s director, Mr. Eustace P. Peevly. In between are the usual assortment of oddballs and comic relief including Bananas the Gorilla, Furface the Lion, Bumbo the Elephant, Slicks the Fox, Hippy the Hippopotamus, Hercules the Hippopotamus, George the Giraffe, Beaks the Pelican, Tiptoes the Ostrich, Gabby the Parrot, Melvyn the Monkey, Hoppy the Kangaroo, Zeed the Zebra, Ollie the Octopus, Einstein the Owl, Arnie and Gloria the Gorillas, Specs the Mole, and Pipsqueak the Mouse.

Typical antics can be seen in the very first show, “Keep Your Keeper” as Hair Bear convinces Peevly he has Zoolerium, thinking he would finally get free until the strict replacement zoo keeper shows up to spoil the fun.

The vocal cast is stellar featuring Hall of Famers Paul Winchell, Daws Butler, John Stephenson, Don Messick, and Janet Waldo in concurrent roles.

There are sixteen episodes for those who want the complete H-B library but there is little fresh enough to recommend this.

When I read The Great Gatsby in AP English back in 1975, I knew it was considered a literary classic but didn’t fall in love with it, despite East Egg’s source material, Great Neck, was nearby. It was a world of the wealthy and decadent that didn’t make sense to me. More recently, though, I reread it for the first time in preparation for my teaching career. With some experience, age, and wisdom, I came to see F. Scott Fitzgerald’s prose in a new light. I certainly got to appreciate that this was a fresh take class, wealth, and The American Dream.

So, when I heard director Baz Luhrmann was going to bring his visual sensibilities to bringing the novel to the silver screen, I thought this could be a wonderful treat, matching the imaginativeness of his Romeo & Juliet and verve from Moulin Rouge. The casting — from Tobey Maguire’s Nick to Leonardo DiCaprio’s Gatsby – sounded spot on, mixing big names with less familiar ones. That it would be shot in 3-D sounded daring but if anyone could turn a novel into a spectacle, it was Luhrmann.

The resulting film, released last May and out this week on home video, proved interesting but ultimately disappointing. It could be, I and others, expected too much from the director or he just didn’t see the world of Jay Gatsby the way we did. It received mixed reviews and tepid box office for what should have been a box office smash.

Part of the problem could be that he amped things up too much. In what could have been an interesting indictment of the 1920’s one percenters, he chose instead to make things so lavish, so big, so indulgent that it staggered the imagination. Compare the party scenes he shot with the ones glimpsed in the trailer for the 1926 silent adaptation, just a few years after the book’s initial publication. Luhrmann made everything so out of scale, perhaps because of the intended 3-D wow factor, that it felt less like a story and more like a fairy tale (or cautionary tale).

Nick Caraway (Maguire) is the audience’s representative as he slowly gets sucked into the world of the ultra-rich, ultra-secretive Jay Gatsby (DiCaprio). More stories exist about him than actual facts but over the course of the story, we learn that he went from rags to riches through nefarious means and intends to reclaim Daisy (Carey Mulligan) who is clearly in a loveless marriage with the rough and tumble Tom (Joel Edgerton). There are parties, fights, flirtations, fast cars, loose women, and gallons of champagne until things suddenly come to a stop with a finality that signaled the end of the Roaring Twenties.

Of course, the novel’s entire story had to be condensed and even the final cut got further trimmed as Luhrmann honed in tighter and tighter on the relationship between Nick and Jay. There are 27 minutes of deleted scenes with the director explaining how delightful they were but needed to go to remain on topic.

The movie looks right with an amazing eye for detail from dresses to jewelry to wallpaper. As usual, the soundtrack is a living thing, a mixture of period era jazz and modern rap, pulsing to a beat that defined a generation. The performances are solid but not revelatory although credit goes to Isla Fisher and Elizabeth Debicki for breathing some life into their supporting roles as, respectively, Myrtle and Jordan.

The movie is available in a variety of formats but the combo pack with Blu-ray, DVD, and Ultraviolet is the one most likely to be purchased and the one reviewed. The bonus features are of course on the high definition disc. The transfer is stunning in its color and clarity, living up to the expectations where Luhrmann rarely disappoints. Similarly, the DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track properly conveys the aural feel of the era and the music subtly plays away, creating a nice sense of place.

There are a series of short bonus features, mostly Luhrmann talking with plenty of clips from the film and source material. There’s an overview, The Greatness of Gatsby (9:14), then some behind-the-scenes footage called Within and Without with Tobey Maguire (8:41). A highlight is a look at The Swinging Sounds of Gatsby (12:17) as the director, composer Craig Armstrong, Jay-Z, Florence Welch (of Florence & the Machine), Lana Del Rey, Bryan Ferry and The XX discuss how the soundtrack came together. A fine companion piece is The Jazz Age” (15:43), lifting liberally from Ric Burns’ New York documentary.

Razzle Dazzle: The Fashion of the ‘20s (16:22) has Luhrmann’s wife, and the film’s Costume Designer Catherine Martin reveal how they worked closely with Brooks Brothers, Tiffany & Co. and Prada to revive the look, largely thanks to archival designs and pieces in the various archives.

The author gets his due in Fitzgerald’s Visual Poetry (6:55) which also touches on the 3-D process. Then we have four more short behind-the-scenes looks under the umbrella title Gatsby Revealed.

Disney has released new images from Muppets Most Wanted, coming in spring 2014. Additionally, a new trailer has been released. ComicMix has it all below.

Genre:                         Family Comedy
Rating:                        TBD
Release Date:           March 21, 2014
Cast:                            Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, The Great Gonzo, Animal, Ricky Gervais, Ty Burrell and Tina Fey
Director:                   James Bobin
Producers:               David Hoberman, Todd Lieberman
Executive Producers:    Nicholas Stoller, John G. Scotti
Screenplay by:              James Bobin, Nicholas Stoller

Disney’s Muppets Most Wanted takes the entire Muppets gang on a global tour, selling out grand theaters in some of Europe’s most exciting destinations, including Berlin, Madrid and London. But mayhem follows the Muppets overseas, as they find themselves unwittingly entangled in an international crime caper headed by Constantine—the World’s Number One Criminal and a dead ringer for Kermit—and his dastardly sidekick Dominic, aka Number Two, portrayed by Ricky Gervais. The film stars Tina Fey as Nadya, a feisty prison guard, and Ty Burrell as Interpol agent Jean Pierre Napoleon.

Disney’s Muppets Most Wanted is directed by James Bobin and produced by David Hoberman and Todd Lieberman. Bobin co-wrote the screenplay with Nicholas Stoller, who is also executive producer with John G. Scotti. Featuring music from Academy Award®-winning songwriter Bret McKenzie, Muppets Most Wanted hits the big screen March 21, 2014.

Starring Ricky Gervais, Ty Burrell and Tina Fey, Disney’s Muppets Most Wanted takes the entire Muppets gang on a global tour where they find themselves unwittingly entangled in an international crime caper.

NOTES:

• Director James Bobin returns to Muppets mania. For his work as Disney’s The Muppets director, Bobin was nominated for BAFTA (Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer). He co-created HBO’s Flight of the Conchords, which he wrote, directed and exec produced.
• Bret McKenzie, who won an Oscar® for best original song for “Man or Muppet,” returns to the Muppets stage as music supervisor. McKenzie created, co-wrote, executive produced and starred in the hit HBO television series Flight of the Conchords,”
• Ricky Gervais is the creator of Derek and the Golden Globe®- and Emmy®-winning series The Office and Extras.
• Ty Burrell is an Emmy® Award winner for his role in TV’s Modern Family.
• Tina Fey is a Golden Globe®-, Emmy®- and SAG Award®-winning actress and writer Tina Fey (30 Rock, Mean Girls, Date Night).

Ender’s Game, coming to theaters on November 1, has today unveiled a brand new one-sheet and trailer.

In the near future, a hostile alien race called the Formics have attacked Earth. If not for the legendary heroics of International Fleet Commander Mazer Rackham (Ben Kingsley), all would have been lost. In preparation for the next attack, the highly esteemed Colonel Hyrum Graff (Harrison Ford) and the International Military are training only the best young minds to find the future Mazer.

Ender Wiggin (Asa Butterfield), a shy but strategically brilliant boy, is recruited to join the elite.  Arriving at Battle School, Ender quickly and easily masters increasingly difficult challenges and simulations, distinguishing himself and winning respect amongst his peers. Ender is soon ordained by Graff as the military’s next great hope, resulting in his promotion to Command School.  Once there, he’s trained by Mazer Rackham himself to lead his fellow soldiers into an epic battle that will determine the future of Earth and save the human race.

Based on the best-selling, award winning novel, Ender’s Game is an epic adventure which stars Asa Butterfield, Hailee Steinfeld, Ben Kingsley, Viola Davis, with Abigail Breslin and Harrison Ford.