Bovie Movie

Scary Movie screenwriters Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer join forces to parody the “biggest” movies ever to hit the silver screen in this comedy that gives such popular box-office hits as Pirates of the Caribbean and Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe the same treatment that Scary Movie gave to the slasher subgenre. A virtual smorgasbord of spoof, Epic Movie tells the tale of four fully grown orphans: one the victim of snakes that attacked her plane, another raised by a kindly Louvre curator, the third a Mexican “libre” wrestling refuge, and the last an average mutant from an “X”-community. When the curious quartet visits a sprawling chocolate factory, they stumble across a magical wardrobe which transports them to the enchanted land of Gnarnia. It seems that the wondrous fantasy land has recently fallen under the spell of the evil White Bitch (Jennifer Coolidge), and in order to bring peace back to Gnarnia these four bumbling mortals will have to join forces with a charismatic pirate, a painfully sincere group of aspiring wizards, and one particularly libidinous lion.

A dark, bitter commentary on modern American life cloaked in the form of a surrealist western, Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man stars Johnny Depp as William Blake, a newly-orphaned accountant who leaves his home in Cleveland to accept a job in the frontier town of Machine. Upon his arrival, Blake is told by the factory owner Dickinson (Robert Mitchum) that the job has already been filled. Dejectedly, he enters a nearby tavern, ultimately spending the night with a former prostitute. A violent altercation with the woman’s lover (Gabriel Byrne), also Dickinson’s son, leaves Blake a murderer as well as mortally wounded, a bullet lodged dangerously close to his heart. He flees into the wilderness, where a Native American named Nobody (Gary Farmer) mistakes Blake for the English poet William Blake and determines that he will be Blake’s guide in his protracted passage into the spirit world.

Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern play a pair of lovers on the run in David Lynch’s surrealist road movie Wild at Heart. Cage’s Sailor Ripley is a violent ex-convict with an Elvis Presley fixation who falls in love with Dern’s Lula Pace Fortune, the daughter of a rich, but mentally unstable, Southern belle named Marietta (Diane Ladd, Dern’s real-life mother). Just after Sailor is released from prison, where he was jailed for brutally killing one of Marietta’s thugs, he and Lula take off on a wild cross-country trip, pursued by his parole officer, her mother, criminals, bounty hunters, and detectives. Along the way, Sailor and Lula have a lot of sex, share their pasts, share their respective obsessions for Elvis and The Wizard of Oz, and meet a lot of bizarre characters, including a seedy ex-marine (Willem Dafoe) who persuades Sailor to participate in a bank robbery.

The basketball comedy Like Mike comes to DVD with a pair of transfers. The widescreen anamorphic transfer preserves the original theatrical aspect ratio of 1.85:1, and is preferable to the standard full-frame image. The English soundtrack is rendered in Dolby Digital 5.1. French and Spanish soundtracks have also been recorded in Surround. English and Spanish subtitles are accessible. Supplemental materials include a commentary track recorded by the director as well as co-stars Lil' Bow Wow and Jonathan Lipnicki, deleted scenes with optional commentary, a making-of featurette, and a music video. This is a strong release from 20th Century Fox.

The three most glamorous and butt-kicking private detectives in the business are back and ready to take on bad guys in this sequel to the 2000 blockbuster screen adaptation of the once-popular television series. Dylan (Drew Barrymore), Natalie (Cameron Diaz), and Alex (Lucy Liu) are once again summoned to the office of their boss Charlie (voice of John Forsythe), where they’re introduced to his new right-hand man Jimmy Bosley (Bernie Mac) and given their latest assignment. It seems a pair of rings have gone missing and need to be recovered, but this was no ordinary jewel heist — the rings have been coded with special information that can be used to access a list of every person in the FBI’s Witness Protection Program, and when a handful of protected informants are murdered, the Angels are brought in to help crack the case. As the women search for the culprits, they encounter Madison Lee (Demi Moore), one of Charlie’s former agents who decided that the wrong side of the law pays better, and Seamus (Justin Theroux), who once dated Dylan and wants revenge for her decision to turn him over to the police. Luke Wilson and Matt LeBlanc return as (respectively) Natalie and Alex’s love interests, as does Crispin Glover as the Thin Man; John Cleese, Robert Forster, and Eric Bogosian also appear in supporting roles.

They’re beautiful, they’re brilliant, and they can kick your butt — the most glamorous private eyes in the world are back in action in this big-screen adaptation of the popular ’70s television series. Natalie (Cameron Diaz) is the smart but silly one, Dylan (Drew Barrymore) is the tough but fun-loving one, and Alex (Lucy Liu) is the classy but hard-as-nails one, and they work for a man named Charlie (voice of John Forsythe), who never meets his employees face to face. Along with their helper Bosley (Bill Murray), the Angels are sent into action when electronics genius Eric Knox (Sam Rockwell) is kidnapped, with the nefarious Roger Corwin (Tim Curry) as the prime suspect. But they soon learn even bigger danger is afoot — the kidnappers have gotten their hands on Knox’s latest invention, a system that can monitor voice communication from anywhere in the world, virtually ending the notion of private conversation. Charlie’s Angels also stars Crispin Glover, Luke Wilson, Kelly Lynch, and Tom Green.

Contemporary high schooler Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) doesn’t have the most pleasant of lives. Browbeaten by his principal at school, Marty must also endure the acrimonious relationship between his nerdy father (Crispin Glover) and his lovely mother (Lea Thompson), who in turn suffer the bullying of middle-aged jerk Biff (Thomas F. Wilson), Marty’s dad’s supervisor. The one balm in Marty’s life is his friendship with eccentric scientist Doc (Christopher Lloyd), who at present is working on a time machine. Accidentally zapped back into the 1950s, Marty inadvertently interferes with the budding romance of his now-teenaged parents. Our hero must now reunite his parents-to-be, lest he cease to exist in the 1980s. It won’t be easy, especially with the loutish Biff, now also a teenager, complicating matters. Beyond its dazzling special effects, the best element of Back to the Future is the performance of Michael J. Fox, who finds himself in the quagmire of surviving the white-bread 1950s with a hip 1980s mindset. Back to the Future cemented the box-office bankability of both Fox and the film’s director, Robert Zemeckis, who went on to helm two equally exhilarating sequels.