Fox Searchlight Pictures Chief Operating Officer Nancy Utley
announced Tuesday that the company acquired the Northern American rights to the
inspiring nonfiction movie Young @ Heart,
which picked up the Audience Award for the Best International Feature at the
recently concluded 2007 Los Angeles Film Festival.

“Young @ Heart is
everything one could want in a movie-going experience: surprising, moving,
enlightening and entertaining,” said Utley. “The audience becomes a community
as they laugh, applaud, and shed some tears. We couldn’t be more honored to
have this film as Searchlight’s first documentary in over a decade.”

Directed by Stephen Walker, the movie stars a New
England senior citizens chorus that has delighted audiences
worldwide with their covers of songs by everyone from The Clash to Coldplay. Produced
by Sally George and funded by Channel 4 in the UK,
the film is scheduled to be released in the spring of 2008. “I am absolutely
thrilled,” said Walker. “This is
the first film for our new company, Walker George Films, and my producer and I
are incredibly excited to be working with the wonderfully talented and
enthusiastic team at Fox Searchlight.”

Walker should be stoked — this is exactly the sort of small picture that Fox Searchlight excels in marketing, and squeezing its full potential from.

Fox Searchlight has announced the start of principal photography in Los Angeles on The Night Watchman, starring Keanu Reeves, Forest Whitaker and a sprawling ensemble cast. Reeves stars as Tom Ludlow, a veteran LAPD cop who finds
life difficult to navigate after the death of his wife. When evidence
implicates him in the execution of a fellow officer, he’s forced to go against the cop culture he’s been a part of his entire life, ultimately
leading him to question the loyalties of everyone around him. One surmises more rules of conduct, written or unspoken, are then broken.

The movie represents the continued mining of a seam for Training Day and Harsh Times scribe David Ayer, who jumps back behind the camera after helping polish an original script by James Ellroy. Hugh Laurie, Chris Evans, Jay Mohr, Terry Crews, Cedric the Entertainer, Common, The Game, John Corbett, Kirstin Pierce and Amaury Nolasco round out the cast, among others.

The innovative “Masters of Horror” anthology series gets unleashed in collected form on August 28, from Anchor Bay Entertainment. Housed in a specially designed “mausoleum” (above), the box
set contains all 13 DVDs from the series’ first season — each disc boasting two
to three hours of bonus features — as well as a special 14th disc of all-new, never-before-seen
footage. Winner of numerous accolades, including an Emmy and two Saturn awards,
the “Masters of Horror” season one box set will be limited to 20,000 units, so
once the mausoleums are gone, there will be no resurrection.

“We really wanted to give the fans something special for the
season one box set, as a thank you for their unwavering support,” explains Mick
Garris, the series’ creator and executive producer. “We’ve always strived to
make ‘Masters of Horror’ something truly unique within the genre, far from the
remakes and sequels synonymous with modern horror, and now fans can enjoy season
one in its entirety, and as a single experience.”

The “Masters of Horror” set presents each episode complete
and in its entirety, in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen and riveting Dolby digital
5.1 surround sound. Housed on separate discs, the 13 episodes include John Landis’ fantastic Deer Woman, William Malone’s Fair Haired Child, Stuart Gordon’s Dreams in the Witch House, Lucky McKee’s Sick Girl, Joe Dante’s superb Homecoming and eight more hour-long films. Each disc features up
to three hours’ worth of value-added supplements, including audio commentaries from
the filmmakers, behind-the-scenes featurettes, career retrospectives, festival
interviews, picture and storyboard galleries,
trailers, DVD-ROM versions of the scripts and more. The set’s bonus disc
contains a “Masters of Horror” dinner, with Garris and the season one directors
gathered at Hollywood’s legendary Magic Castle; a “Masters of Horror” DGA panel
discussion; and special interviews, conducted by Garris, with filmmakers Steven
Spielberg and John Boorman.

So with Transformers set to bow next week, the franchise is of course making the most of its marketing push, and not merely with a new, tricked-out toyline for kids.

KIDdesigns is trotting out the Transformers Head of the Class Activity Center (ages 5+, $69.99), which looks like the above in its folded-up, compact version, and appears as below when opened up. They’re also releasing a Transformer Trans Portable PC (ages 3+, $29.99). For more information, visit KIDdirect.com by clicking here. (There’s no word, alas, on if there will be a Transformer Micro-Pirate Video Recorder.) For a review of the movie, meanwhile, click here. More thoughts to follow this week.

Evan Almighty, may be a grand-scale misfire of sorts, but don’t let it be said director Tom Shadyac and distributor Universal didn’t try to do some environmental good with the movie (above), planting over 20 acres of trees in protected areas across America and balancing out the carbon footprint of both the movie’s production and its premiere. For more information on The Conservation Fund, America’s top-rated environmental charity, visit Get on Board by clicking here.

It has to be the most bizarre DVD tie-in of the week. Celebrating the forthcoming August bow of its special edition
release of Todd Phillips’ documentary Hated,
about punk rocker GG Allin, MVD is giving fans an unusual opportunity — to
purchase a limited edition 18” x 24” replica poster of the GG Allin portrait
that serial killer John Wayne Gacy painted in his jail cell on death row, two
years before his execution. The
cost is only $4.95 (including shipping). For more information and/or to order, phone (800) 888-0486
between the hours of 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. EST, Monday through Friday, or order
online
by clicking here.

I didn’t really want to imagine Saw IV actually existed, but it apparently does, with Shawnee Smith, Angus Macfadyen and Tobin Bell all returning… the latter maybe in cameo form? At any rate, an image from the film has released, of a woman sitting in a chair that can’t be that good for the back, rocking one of those animal masks — all steeped in shadow, naturally. The only interesting thing is that if you look closely, there appears to be a gun pointed at her head.

Kudos to LionsGate for teasing this one out. Still, I think David Morgan at Filmwad pretty much hit the nail on the head with his comments. Continuing director Darren Lynn Bousman — whom I’ve interviewed, and stuck me as a nice guy — has pretty much hit the gravy train with this series.

So the first picture of Harrison Ford on the set of the fourth Indiana Jones movie is up on the Indiana Jones community site — snapped by director Steven Spielberg, no less — and it looks like production, which commenced yesterday, is starting with a bang, no hand-wringing scenes of namby-pamby exposition chatter or anything. (Those will be left to Jim Broadbent, I guess.) Ergo, Indy’s bloodstained pants, and the blood in and around his ear.

I can only hope that this scene of repose, however, was soon followed by Ford whip-cracking the shorts off of that production assistant in the background, cackling with glee and growling, “I’ve still got it.”

Filming will continue throughout the summer, with the movie set to release May 22, 2008. No word, yet, though, on whether the “Opal of the Mer-Man Prince” will be found…

At the recent press day for You Kill Me, Téa Leoni recounted a memorable coupling with husband David Duchovny, and she touched more on her courtship with Duchovny during an appearance on The Tonight Show this past Thursday evening. Allowing that they’d just celebrated their 10th anniversary with “some hotel fun” (“All those new sheets and towels…” she said suggestively), Leoni recalled first meeting Duchovny during an exploratory booking lunch with a pair of Jay Leno’s producers, who typically take drinks or meals with up-and-coming actors to gauge how interesting a guest they might make. Several years later she walked in on a conversation between her agent and him, and, when told who’d entered the room, Duchovny asked if she’d stopped talking yet. Nine weeks later they were married. Now that’s some rakish, ring-a-ding charm.

A little more than a week after appearing on Oprah Winfrey’s show to promote his latest film, Sicko, documentarian Michael Moore hit the comfy chair of David Letterman’s The Late Show Friday night, where he rocked the more characteristic baseball cap that he’d abandoned for his date with the queen of daytime talk.

Moore talked about the more than 18,000 deaths per year nationally that result from in-network hospital red-tape crapola that mandates things like driving a baby with a temperature of 104 degrees across town to a different care facility. Letterman, sympathetic but obviously right-leaning and of the more free-market persuasion, asked Moore if he was sure these weren’t “one-off circumstances,” but Moore was politely firm, and the chat was far from contentious. He didn’t point out, as on Oprah, that as a society we have “socialized” (the new, single-word scare tactic of those married to the status quo) emergency care and fire response, but that will doubtfully be in heavy rotation once the film’s detractors come out swinging upon its release.

Instead, Moore talked a good bit about his trip to Cuba, and how the Bush administration, in its investigation and threatened fining of him, is pursuing an avenue of legal recourse that could then give them the exercisable right to confiscate his film as a thing of determinate value illegally “imported” from (read: partially filmed in) Cuba, which is of course classified as a non-trade partner with the United States.

Since the film releases June 29, though, I’m not sure if that would mean profit confiscation or what. I’ll be screening it next week, and have some thoughts shortly thereafter.

Ever wonder what Office Space would be like animated, and shortened to 30 seconds? Oh, and featuring all of the characters recast as rabbits? Then click here…

Cinema16 is pleased to announce the American release of Cinema
16: European Short Films in early September 2007. Critically acclaimed upon
its release overseas, this special two-disc DVD features previously unseen movies and early works by some of today’s most notable
filmmakers, as well as award-winning films from rising stars. In addition to
the films, the set contains over three hours of commentaries, many by the filmmakers themselves.

Dubbed “a must-have for any film
fan” by The London Telegraph, Cinema 16: European
Short Films celebrates the art of brevity by showcasing the best classic,
cult and award-winning shorts on DVD. The label launched in Europe
in 2003 with the release of British Short
Films, a collection that includes films by Peter Greenaway, Mike Leigh and
Stephen Daldry among others. That was followed up by the 2004 European Short Films release and, a year
later, American Short Films, which
includes works of Gus Van Sant, Andy Warhol, Tim Burton and others.

Cinema16: European
Short Films’ roster includes works by noted directors such as Christopher
Nolan, Lars Von Trier, Lynne Ramsay, Ridley Scott,
Roy Andersson (Songs From the Second
Floor), Mathieu Kassovitz
and Nanni Morettti, as well as award-winning and celebrated shorts including
Anders Thomas Jensen’s Oscar winner Election
Night, Juan Solanas’ Cannes Jury Prize winner The Man Without a Head and Toby MacDonald’s BAFTA-nominated Je T’aime John Wayne.

“Cinema16’s goal is to raise the profile of short films,
which have been integral to the careers of so many great directors,” said Luke
Morris, producer of Je T’aime John Wayne
and creator of the Cinema 16 label. “The line gives people access to incredibly
strong works that might otherwise be seen only by film festival audiences and
film school professors, if at all.” For more information, visit Cinema16.org.