Nussbaum, Mike

Field of Dreams (Widescreen Two-Disc Anniversary Edition)

"If you build it he will come." With these words Iowa farmer Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner) is inspired by a voice he can't ignore to pursue a dream he can hardly believe.Now presented as a 2-disc set this all-new Anniversary Edition features unsurpassed sound and clarity with digitally remastered 5.1 audio and video plus hours of never-before-seen bonus features that extend the magic of the film.Also starring Ray Liotta James Earl Jones and Amy Madigan Field of Dreams is an extraordinary and unforgettable experience that has moved critics and audiences like no other film of its generation.Field of Dreams is a glowing tribute to all who dare to dream.System Requirements: Running Time 106 MinFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA Rating: PG UPC: 025192014024 Manufacturer No: 61020140

A phenomenal hit when it was released in 1989, Field of Dreams has become a modern classic and a uniquely American slice of cinema. It functions effectively as a moving drama about the power of dreams, a fantasy ode to our national pastime, and a brilliant adaptation of W.P. Kinsella's exquisite baseball novel Shoeless Joe. Kinsella himself found the film a delightful surprise, differing greatly from his novel but benefiting from its own creative variations. It is the film that cemented Kevin Costner's status as an all-American screen star, but the story resonates far beyond Costner's handsome appeal. As just about everyone knows by now, Costner stars as Iowa farmer Ray Kinsella, who hears the mysterious words "If you build it, he will come," and is compelled to build a baseball diamond in the middle of his cornfield. His wife (Amy Madigan) supports the wild idea, but a reclusive novelist (modeled after J.D. Salinger and played by James Earl Jones) is not so easily persuaded. The idealistic farmer is either a visionary or a deluded fool, but his persistence is rewarded when spirits from baseball's past begin appearing on the ball field. Past and present intermingle in the person of "Moonlight Graham" (superbly played by Burt Lancaster), an unknown player who sacrificed his dreams of baseball glory for a dignified life as a small-town physician ... but what all of this means is unclear until the film's memorably heartfelt conclusion. A meditation on family, memory, and faith, the film balances humor and magic to strike just the right chord of thoughtful emotion, affecting audiences so deeply that the baseball field created for the production has now become a mecca of sorts for dreamers around the world. --Jeff Shannon

Men in Black (Deluxe Edition)

To the Men in Black: New York City is being threatened by a villainous bug who has inhabited the body of a farmer. Your mission is to locate and exterminate this bug before it destroys our planet. We have a cache of weapons for you to arm yourselves with including the Carbonizer Series 4 De-Atomizer and the Noisy Cricket. Make sure you also bring your Neuralyzers. You may also find Dr. Laurel Weaver and an alien arms dealer useful in carrying out your task. Good luck!Bonus Features:Visual Commentary by Director Barry Sonnenfeld and actor Tommy Lee Jones with on-screen diagramsEdgar Bug Fight Study using Multi-Angle (Limited Edition Exclusive)Character Animation Studies using Multi-AngleWill Smith & Mikey Music VideoFilmographyProduction StillsStoryboards and Conceptual ArtAudio Commentary by Director Barry Sonnenfeld Rick Baker and ILM TeamMaking Of FeaturetteExtended and Alternate Scenes"Creatures: Concept to Completion" Making Of (Limited Edition Exclusive)Tunnel Scene Deconstruction using Multi-AngleTrailer and TeaserProduction InfoCast/Crew BiographiesDVD-ROMDocumentary "Metamorphosis of Men In Black"Storyboard-to-Film comparison2-page booklet with letter from Director Barry SonnenfeldReproduction of conceptual drawings signed by director Sonnenfeld and Rick BakerSecret Files: Sneak Peek at "MIB II"System Requirements:Starring: Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith. Running Time: 98 Min. Color. This film is presented in both "Widescreen" and "Standard" formats. Copyright 2002 Columbia TriStar.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: ACTION/ADVENTURE Rating: PG-13 UPC: 043396087712 Manufacturer No: 08771

This imaginative summer comedy from director Barry Sonnenfeld (Get Shorty) is a lot of fun, largely on the strength of Will Smith's engaging performance as the rookie partner of a secret agent (Tommy Lee Jones) assigned to keep tabs on Earth-dwelling extraterrestrials. There's lots of comedy to spare in this bright film, some of the funniest stuff found in the margins of the major action. (A scene with Smith's character being trounced in the distance by a huge alien while Jones questions a witness is a riot.) The inventiveness never lets up, and the cast--including Vincent D'Onofrio doing frighteningly convincing work as an alien occupying a decaying human--hold up their end splendidly. --Tom Keogh

Fatal Attraction (Special Collector's Edition)

A rejected woman is driven into madness after an affair with a married man and seeks revenge on his family.
Genre: Suspense
Rating: R
Release Date: 24-JUN-2003
Media Type: DVD

The date movie of the late 1980s, this had everyone arguing in the aisles. Does Michael Douglas deserve the unwanted attention he and his family are receiving at the hands of loony stalker Glenn Close? After a weekend extramarital affair with colleague Close, he returns home to wife Anne Archer, and Close becomes progressively angrier. You might even say she is boiling bunny mad.

Directed by Adrian Lyne, this is not your average thriller, as it garnered six Academy Award nominations. The plot is too obvious, but the dialogue rings true and the intense performances hold the story together. Anne Archer deserves kudos for side-stepping cliché as the strong but frightened wife, and Close is a scream as she chews up the scenery.

The film's original ending, which was reshot after poor preview screenings, has been added to the video release. --Rochelle O'Gorman

Gypsy

It's multi-award winner Bette Midler in the role she was born to play. This Emmy winning superstar delivers a "standing room only" performance as Mama Rose the ultimate vaudeville stage mother. Rose's ambition for her two daughters forces one to desert her and the other to emerge as the world's most famous striptease artist-Gypsy Rose Lee.System Requirements: Running Time 150 MinFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: MUSICALS/MUSICALS Rating: NR UPC: 707729172062 Manufacturer No: 17206

This faithful broadcast TV remake of the classic Jule Styne/Stephen Sondheim musical looms as a career triumph for top-lined Bette Midler--and a bittersweet measurement of how far mainstream film and TV have retreated from the glories of musical theater. By the time Midler, as the mother of all stage mothers, observes, "I was born too early and started too late," it's only too obvious that the star's words are an ironic inversion. Had Midler been born earlier, she certainly would have reigned as a major musical comedy star. In a role form-fitted to Ethel Merman's brassy persona and brassier voice, Midler more than holds her ground musically and, especially, dramatically.

Titled partly for its source, the life of stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, Gypsy alludes as well to the itinerant life of her family. The show's focal point isn't the titular character, but rather her manipulative mother, Mama Rose (Midler), who channels her own frustrated dreams of stardom into Baby June, the curly blonde daughter who always eclipses sister Louise. The story follows Rose's machinations as she tirelessly reinvents June to defy the passage of time and even puberty itself. By the time Louise herself conquers the marquee as Gypsy Rose Lee, Rose's single-minded focus has alienated her long-suffering lover and agent, Herbie (a well-cast Peter Riegert), and surrendered to the inherent compromise of burlesque.

Midler's Rose reveals glimpses of vulnerability and a delusional monstrousness that provide a dark, gritty subtext. Studded with wonderful songs, the Styne/Sondheim score underlines those themes deftly, especially in Sondheim's multileveled lyrics. This Gypsy also benefits from uniformly nifty casting: in addition to Reigert (Crossing Delancey, Local Hero), Cynthia Gibb slowly blooms as Louise, and Jennifer Rae Beck, Andrea Martin, Christine Ebersole, and erstwhile new-wave singer Rachel Sweet are delights. --Sam Sutherland

Field of Dreams (Full Screen Two-Disc Anniversary Edition)

House of Games

David Mamet's 1987 directorial debut was this mesmerizing study of control and seduction between two kinds of detached observers: a gambler who is also a con artist, and a psychotherapist who is also an emerging pop-psych guru in the book market. The latter (played by Lindsay Crouse) meets the former (Joe Mantegna) when one of her clients is driven to despair from his debts to the card shark. Mantegna's character agrees to drop the IOUs in exchange for Crouse's attention at the seedy House of Games in Seattle, a mecca for con men to talk shop and hustle unsuspecting customers. The shrink gets so caught up in the arcane rules and world view of her guide over subsequent days that she observes--with no false rapture--various stings in progress inside and outside the club. Mamet's story finally becomes a fascinating study of two people protecting and extending their respective cosmologies the way rival predators fight for the same piece of turf. The psychological challenge is compelling; so is the stylized dialogue, with its pattern of pauses and hiccups and humming meter. Mostly shooting at night, Mamet also gave Seattle a different look from previous filmmakers, turning its familiar puddles into concentrations of liquid neon and poisonous noir. --Tom Keogh

It's the shrink vs. the shark in the ultimate mind game! Starring OscarÂ(r) nominee* Lindsay Crouse (The Insider) and Joe Montegna (The Godfather III) as an unlikely team of conartists, this "witty and devious" (Time) psychological thriller is OscarÂ(r) nominee** David Mamet's directorial debut. It's an "extraordinary" (Newsweek) and "thrilling funhouse" (New York Post) of mental gamesmanship that will keep you guessing until its exciting end! When a suicidal patient reveals that his gambling debt has him at the end of his rope, dedicated psychiatrist Margaret Ford (Crouse) enters into the shadowy underground world of gaming to help him out. At a seedy casino, she boldly confronts Mike (Montegna), the con man who holds her patient's markers. Duped into a high-stakes poker match, Margaret becomes intoxicated by Mike's mastery, as he both cheats at the game and charms her. She quickly falls for him, turning a blind eye to the fact that he's a swindler who can't be trusted. And before long she finds herself sparring in a mental poker match of the heart with deadly consequences! *1984: Supporting Actress, Places in the Heart **1982: Writing, Screenplay Based on Material From Another Medium, The Verdict; 1997: Writing, Screenplay Based on Material From Another Medium, Wag the Dog

Field of Dreams (Widescreen Collector's Edition)

A phenomenal hit when it was released in 1989, Field of Dreams has become a modern classic and a uniquely American slice of cinema. It functions effectively as a moving drama about the power of dreams, a fantasy ode to our national pastime, and a brilliant adaptation of W.P. Kinsella's exquisite baseball novel Shoeless Joe. Kinsella himself found the film a delightful surprise, differing greatly from his novel but benefiting from its own creative variations. It is the film that cemented Kevin Costner's status as an all-American screen star, but the story resonates far beyond Costner's handsome appeal. As just about everyone knows by now, Costner stars as Iowa farmer Ray Kinsella, who hears the mysterious words "If you build it, he will come," and is compelled to build a baseball diamond in the middle of his cornfield. His wife (Amy Madigan) supports the wild idea, but a reclusive novelist (modeled after J.D. Salinger and played by James Earl Jones) is not so easily persuaded. The idealistic farmer is either a visionary or a deluded fool, but his persistence is rewarded when spirits from baseball's past begin appearing on the ball field. Past and present intermingle in the person of "Moonlight Graham" (superbly played by Burt Lancaster), an unknown player who sacrificed his dreams of baseball glory for a dignified life as a small-town physician ... but what all of this means is unclear until the film's memorably heartfelt conclusion. A meditation on family, memory, and faith, the film balances humor and magic to strike just the right chord of thoughtful emotion, affecting audiences so deeply that the baseball field created for the production has now become a mecca of sorts for dreamers around the world. Universal's widescreen Collector's Edition DVD is a real treat, offering extensive production notes, full-length commentary by writer-director Phil Alden Robinson, and the extensive behind-the-scenes documentary The Making of Field of Dreams. --Jeff Shannon

Men in Black (Collector's Series)

This imaginative summer comedy from director Barry Sonnenfeld (Get Shorty) is a lot of fun, largely on the strength of Will Smith's engaging performance as the rookie partner of a secret agent (Tommy Lee Jones) assigned to keep tabs on Earth-dwelling extraterrestrials. There's lots of comedy to spare in this bright film, some of the funniest stuff found in the margins of the major action. (A scene with Smith's character being trounced in the distance by a huge alien while Jones questions a witness is a riot.) The inventiveness never lets up, and the cast--including Vincent D'Onofrio doing frighteningly convincing work as an alien occupying a decaying human--hold up their end splendidly. --Tom Keogh

Things Change

In Our Own Hands - The Hidden Story of the Jewish Brigade in World War II

The final weeks of World War II. His Majesty's Jewish Brigade - the only all-Jewish fighting unit in the war - goes into combat against the hated Nazis...and comes away victorious. It is after the war, though, that the real story of the Brigade begins. Amidst the chaos of post-war Europe, and under the noses of the occupying Allied armies, the young Jewish soldiers mastermind one clandestine operation after the next: forming secret vengeance squads to assassinate Nazi officers in hiding...engineering the rescue and illegal movement of Holocaust survivors to Palestine. Later, in 1948, Brigade veterans help organize and lead the fledgling Israel Defense Forces in their new country's War of Independence. From the trenches of Northern Italy to the refugee camps of war-torn Europe, In our Own Hands unravels the thrilling tale of young Jewish soldiers who carried the weight of a people on their shoulders. NTSC Format Reviews: "Two thumbs up!" Siskel & Ebert "IN OUR OWN HANDS contains remarkable testimony and great stories...it is occasionally chilling and altogether a revelation." New York Newsday "It may be the most exciting story to come out of the last years of the Holocaust and World War II." Chicago Jewish News "As someone who portrayed a fictional Jewish Brigade officer in the movie Exodus, I am delighted to learn that the real and dramatic story of the Brigade is now at last being told in full." Paul Newman Actor "I wanted you to know how impressed I was with the video on the Jewish Brigade in World War II...Congratulations on a great idea and first-rate presentation. It's a story that has to be told." Hal Bruno Director Political Coverage, ABC News "You have caught an episode in world Jewish history at the last possible moment, and you have given us all a precious gift." Arnold Jacob Wolf Rabbi K.A.M.-Isaiah Israel Congregation, Chicago