Still feeling grateful folks. I can’t help it, it’s this month. Ya got Thanksgiving coming up, the weather’s finally changing (although this Philly humidity is total bullshizz) and the DVD coffers are filled to the rim with causes for celebration these days.And with this TV writers’ strike shaping up to suck long and big, having a few great DVDs to keep your flat-screen toasty is never a bad thing. Especially if the DVDs themselves are bad-ass weirdness like this week’s basket of goodies.First up, and huge props to the geniuses (geniui?) at Paramount Home Video, is Twin Peaks: The Definitive Gold Box Edition. Oh, holy Log Lady, is this set stellar! Not only package-wise, but also in what's going on inside the sleek box. 10 discs, including the pilot that was woefully absent from the original first-season set, and oodles of extras on the making of the show that confused so many of us between 1990 and ’91. Trust me, as soon as you see poor plastic-wrapped...
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Ray Wise
Tonight's two-hour 24 "event" (beginning at 8 pm/ET on Fox) will host a parade of faces new and familiar, including Elisha Cuthbert's return as Jack's beleaguered daughter and the debut of C. Thomas Howell as Kim's (overdue, if you ask me) therapist. The evening also introduces us to Vice President Hal Gardner, who has been choicely cast with Ray Wise, a star of the Oscar-nominated Good Night, and Good Luck and who is familiar to TV fans as Twin Peaks' very bad dad, Leland Palmer. TVGuide.com welcomed the chance to ask Wise about his 24 VP, working with George Clooney
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Ray Wise
Monday's two-hour 24 "event" (beginning at 8 pm/ET on Fox) will host a parade of faces new and familiar, including Elisha Cuthbert's return as Jack's beleaguered daughter and the debut of C. Thomas Howell as Kim's (overdue, if you ask me) therapist. The evening also introduces us to Vice President Hal Gardner, who has been choicely cast with Ray Wise, a star of the Oscar-nominated Good Night, and Good Luck and who is familiar to TV fans as Twin Peaks' very bad dad, Leland Palmer. TVGuide.com welcomed the chance to ask Wise about his 24 VP, working with George Clooney
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Question: With all the best- and worst-of-2005 lists I've seen, I've been wondering about the worst movies of all time. But though I've seen dozens of lists, with the exception of Plan 9 from Outer Space and Glen or Glenda, the movies on the lists all seem to have been made between 1980 and the present. Are there any bad-movie lists that go back to the early days of film, or is it just that movies started getting really bad in the 1980s?
Answer: I'll answer the second part of your question first: It's not that movies have gotten worse but that smarty-pants treasuring of "worst movies of all time" lists is a relatively recent phenomenon, one that I blame on Harry and Michael Medved and their condescending Golden Turkey Awards. I'm not saying that there aren't terrible movies out there, only that squandering energy that could be better used in any of a hundred ways on hunting down and cata
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Question: I enjoy watching those AFI (American Film Institute) specials, but what is AFI's function?
Answer: Founded in 1967, AFI is a film school: Directors David Lynch, Terrence Malick, Darren Aronofsky, Paul Schrader, Carl Franklin and Amy Heckerling all went there. Its initial funding came from the then-recently created (and now embattled) National Endowment for the Arts, the MPAA and the Ford Foundation, a heavy hitter in early corporate-sector support for the arts
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Question: It's commonly known that A Fistful of Dollars is a remake of Yojimbo. But I recall reading somewhere that the inspiration for Yojimbo was the Alan Ladd version of The Glass Key. Is this true?
Answer: I've read that Akira Kurosawa cites the Alan Ladd version of Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key (1942) as one of his inspirations for Yojimbo (1961). But Yojimbo's plot, which revolves around a masterless samurai (Toshiro Mifune) who blows into a lawless town ruled by warring gangs and r
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