Duvall, Shelley

The Shining (Two-Disc Special Edition)

?Heeeeere?s Johnny!? In a macabre masterpiece adapted from Stephen King?s novel, Jack Nicholson falls prey to forces haunting a snowbound mountain resort with a macabre history.

Popeye

Nothing interests filmmaker Robert Altman more than a contained culture that mixes bare humanity with local eccentricity (think of his M*A*S*H and Nashville). So Altman's Popeye (1980), based on the old comic strip, works best as a portrait of a busy, cluttered, cartoonish town called Sweethaven. But it is much less successful as a comprehensible story about the famous sailor with massive forearms and a relationship with Olive Oyl (Shelley Duvall). Robin Williams plays Popeye with his usual brilliance for mimicry, Paul Dooley makes a credible Wimpy, and Paul L. Smith makes an impression as the oversized bully, Bluto. But this strange, disastrous film never becomes more than an expensive workshop airing out Altmanesque themes. --Tom Keogh

A musical version of the cartoon character, Popeye the Sailor Man.
Genre: Feature Film-Comedy
Rating: PG
Release Date: 8-AUG-2006
Media Type: DVD

McCabe & Mrs. Miller

Iconoclastic director Robert Altman (Nashville, M.A.S.H.), deconstructs and demythologizes Hollywood's typically romantic vision of the Old West in this haunting, breathtaking masterpiece. A stranger, McCabe (Warren Beatty's best performance), the film's nonheroic protagonist, rides into a dead northwest mountain town (to the mournful sounds of Leonard Cohen), possessing ambitious entrepreneurial dreams of expansion. As the town grows, Mrs. Miller (Julie Christie's finest role, as well), a tough madam, arrives and convinces McCabe to join her in a partnership. Neither are typical Western archetypes: McCabe's an insecure braggart, bumbling lover, and horrible businessman, while Mrs. Miller, hardly a whore with a heart of gold, favors her opium pipe to her partner's romantic advances. Altman, meanwhile, buries these central characters within the town's complex, richly detailed tapestry of characters, preferring to eavesdrop on their overlapping conversations and study the bleak, harsh conditions of their lifestyles. At its core, the film addresses the sacrifices of individualism needed in order to build a community, an American concept that the independent Altman views with skeptical irony. The inevitable final shoot-out underscores the theme. Because McCabe refuses to sell the town he built to a corporation, hired bounty hunters are sent. Instead of a showdown at high noon, the finale--one of Altman's most beautiful set pieces--takes place in the snow, guerilla warfare style. As McCabe runs and hides for his life, the town he created preoccupies itself with saving a burning church instead of their creator, while Mrs. Miller, stoned and grinning, detaches herself from either concern. Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond captures the town's brutal textures in luminous Cinemascope. --Dave McCoy

One of Robert Altman's most provocative films turns the Wild West on it's ear. Warren Beatty and Julie Christie are a small-time gambler and a madam who go into business together. Year: 1971Running Time: 121 min.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: WESTERN/MISC. Rating: R UPC: 085391105527

Roxanne

In 1987, almost a hundred years after its first production, the romantic story of Cyrano de Bergerac found new life in a winsome film written by Steve Martin. Roxanne updates the tale with a smart '80s spin, yet writer-star Martin stays close to the old-fashioned heart of the matter. He plays a small-town firefighter named C.D. Bales, whose otherwise unremarkable existence is crowned by an amazingly long nose. He falls for the world's most beautiful astronomer (Daryl Hannah), but he is embarrassed by the size of his proboscis and prefers to stay on the sidelines. Like Cyrano, the shy C.D. instead helps a handsome friend (Rick Rossovich) woo the fair lady by providing flowery sentiments and soulful poetry. Not only does the story still work, but Australian director Fred Schepisi captures a dreamy grace in his visual design for the film (some of which will be lost without the widescreen format). Set in Washington State, but filmed in the hilly ski resort of Nelson, British Columbia, the location seems like a fairy-tale town, nearly as unreal as Steve Martin's nose. --Robert Horton

Time Bandits (Special Edition)

Divimax is a High Definition (HD) film transfer process that provides state-of-the-art picture quality--and can be viewed on any home entertainment system.

Nashville

The drama and comedy of the lives of twenty-four major stars as seen in the five days they are in the country music capital of the world.
Genre: Feature Film-Drama
Rating: R
Release Date: 2-MAY-2006
Media Type: DVD

This 1975 film sits near the top of any list of the best films of the 1970s, perhaps in the top five and, in some people's minds, at the pinnacle itself. Robert Altman, at his most Altmanesque, spins together plot strands involving two dozen people over the course of one particularly busy weekend in Music City, USA. Though several of the story lines deal with country-western stars--played by Henry Gibson, Ronee Blakley and Karen Black--the plot also deals with the country scene's wannabes, the business people who pull the strings and the operative for a mysterious presidential candidate who is trying to get the de facto endorsement of some of the country stars by having them appear at a rally for him. (The unknown but rocketing presidential aspirant was eerily echoed the next year, when Jimmy Carter came out of nowhere to win the presidency.) Blakley is heartbreakingly fragile as a Loretta Lynn-like singer on the verge of total mental meltdown, while Lily Tomlin is outstanding as a housewife-gospel singer who has a dalliance with a randy folk-rock cad, perfectly played by Keith Carradine (who won an Oscar for his song "I'm Easy"). The cast also includes Jeff Goldblum, Scott Glenn, Keenan Wynn, Shelley Duvall, Geraldine Chaplin (hilarious as a fatuous British TV journalist), Barbara Harris, Michael Murphy, and Ned Beatty, with cameos by Elliott Gould and Julie Christie as themselves. Next to Mean Streets, perhaps the most influential film of the decade. --Marshall Fine

The Shining

A married couple with a small son are employed to look after a resort hotel high in the Colorado mountains. As a result they are the sole occupants during the long winter. The hotel manager warns them not to accept the job because of a tragedy that occurred during the winter of 1970. Based on the book by Stephen King.Running Time: 146 min.System Requirements:Starring: Jack Nicholson Shelley Duvall Danny Lloyd Scatman Crothers Barry Nelson and Philip Stone. Directed By: Stanley Kubrick. Running Time: 142 Min. Color. This film is presented in "Standard" format. Copyright 2000 Warner Home Video.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: ACTION/ADVENTURE/THRILLERS Rating: R UPC: 085392115624 Manufacturer No: 21156

Stanley Kubrick's The Shining is less an adaptation of Stephen King's bestselling horror novel than a complete reimagining of it from the inside out. In King's book, the Overlook Hotel is a haunted place that takes possession of its off-season caretaker and provokes him to murderous rage against his wife and young son. Kubrick's movie is an existential Road Runner cartoon (his steadicam scurrying through the hotel's labyrinthine hallways), in which the cavernously empty spaces inside the Overlook mirror the emptiness in the soul of the blocked writer, who's settled in for a long winter's hibernation. As many have pointed out, King's protagonist goes mad, but Kubrick's Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) is Looney Tunes from the moment we meet him--all arching eyebrows and mischievous grin. (Both Nicholson and Shelley Duvall reach new levels of hysteria in their performances, driven to extremes by the director's fanatical demands for take after take after take.) The Shining is terrifying--but not in the way fans of the novel might expect. When it was redone as a TV miniseries (reportedly because of King's dissatisfaction with the Kubrick film), the famous topiary-animal attack (which was deemed impossible to film in 1980) was there--but the deeper horror was lost. Kubrick's The Shining gets under your skin and chills your bones; it stays with you, inhabits you, haunts you. And there's no place to hide... --Jim Emerson

Time Bandits

Thieves Like Us

Every few years Robert Altman gets rediscovered by critics and audiences, yet somehow this middle-period gem remains underviewed. It's hard to understand why. In 1974, when he made Thieves Like Us, Altman was in top form. He'd recently made McCabe and Mrs. Miller and The Long Goodbye, and the next year would bring Nashville, his touchstone masterwork. As with his other films, Thieves Like Us at first has a homemade immediacy, chugging along like back-porch skiffle music. Set in the Midwest of the 1930s, early scenes between the three thieves (Keith Carradine, Bert Remsen, and John Schuck) feel like silent-movie era routines about a trio of affable farm boys turned bank robbers. Altman's subject--the "thistledown" critic Pauline Kael once described as Altman's real material--emerges by degrees. The story of hell-bent innocents devolves into a tale of the spell cast over the boys by the newspaper stories that mythologize them. (They turn a corner when their pictures appear in an issue of Real Detective.) The string of bank robberies, interlaced with episodes of a shy romance between Carradine and his Coke-sucking girl, Keechie (Shelley Duvall), becomes an agrarian noir by way of Madame Bovary. These thieves lived just at the point when American pop culture was emerging; the cities may have had Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra, but in the Altmanesque countryside sheet music was wallpaper and what pulled were radio serials such as Gangbusters. Compared at the time to Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde, Thieves Like Us now seems singular, a fable of fatal crime and punishment amid barbershop-quartet music and cricket song. --Lyall Bush

Classic romantic melodrama about three convicted killers Bowie (Carradine) Chicamaw (Schuck) and T-Dub (Remsen) who escape prison in 1937 rural Mississippi. Bowie the youngest of the fugitives meets and falls for an ingenuous farmgirl Keechie (Duvall). The gang quickly turns to the only thing they know bank robbery. The press closely follows the desperados notorious exploits which include a serious car accident another jail break and several killings. Louis Fletcher in her film debut plays Remsen's sister-in-law. Gloomy verisimilitudinous Depression-era atmosphere expressive performances and strong characterization but derivative from They Live by Night (1948).System Requirements:Run Time: 123 minutesFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA Rating: R UPC: 027616073266 Manufacturer No: M107326

Home Fries

A man is frightened to death by a menacing military helicopter, piloted by two young Texan men who just happen to be the dead man's stepsons, Dorian and Angus (Luke Wilson and Jake Busey). To complicate matters, the dead man had had an affair with young Sally (Drew Barrymore), a clerk at the local Burger-Matic who didn't know the guy was married. Now she's pregnant and looking for a supportive guy to be her unborn child's potential father. Dorian fits the role quite nicely, but Angus thinks Sally knows about the helicopter incident, and their scheming mother (Catherine O'Hara) is trying to mastermind a cover-up, and....

So goes the cleverly amusing plot of this light, character-based romantic comedy, which proves Barrymore's charm and versatility once again, gives O'Hara one of her best roles, and moves right along at its own amiable pace. Small-town romance combines with darkly tinged comedy (scripted by X-Files staffer Vince Gilligan), and first-time director Dean Parisot guides it all with casual assurance. There's nothing going on here that's particularly inspired, but Barrymore and Wilson (an off-screen couple during production) make a delightful pair, and the cast makes the most of some hilarious down-home dialogue. All in all, a very pleasant diversion. --Jeff Shannon