White Night Wedding was Iceland's Oscar entry last year. The comedy, which is supposedly a riff on Chekhov's Ivanov, is from the director of 101 Reykjavik and stars his frequent collaborator, Icelandic star Hilmir Snær Guðnason (pictured left in various films) who inspires indecent thoughts and creative pronunciations in his fans.Grace has the ickiest horror premise I've heard of in a long long time. An unborn child with a bloody appetite. Ewww. In other words, I'll only see it if I hear that it's totally brilliant. It also has one of the fastest windows to DVD ever, having opened in theaters last month.
An American Werewolf in London (1981) and The Wolf Man (1941) both get special editions today although we're currently between full moons and we're still more than a month away from Halloween. Not sure what that's about. I'm planning to watch The Wolf Man soon -- maybe you'll join me? -- since I'm on a Claude Rains kick and I don't remember a lick of it and I want to be familiar before the remake arrives in February.
If you like your hairy beasts to remain bipedal once activated, there's also Hugh Jackman and his mutton chops in X-Men Origins: Wolverine. I imagine the box office hit will be big on DVD because there's no accounting for taste and old habits die hard. I'll love the X-Men forever -- I almost can't imagine my childhood and adolescence without them -- but I love the cinema more and damn that movie reeked. It's not the worst superhero movie ever made but I firmly believe that it's the most joyless, give or take the craptacular Elektra. How do you make a superhero movie and forget to have fun? Even the heavy ones with the bat cowls feel somewhat buoyed by the joy of shooting and acting in them. Will anyone ever understand the leaden ugly weight of this thing now that they can skip chapters, freeze frame on Jackman's ass and watch it while they're playing video games? Probably not. I should stop. Yeah, I hated it, OK? You got a problem with that, bub?
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