Home Media Magazine - May 25 - 31, 2008 - (Page 35)

PIPELINE The John Hughes Effect By Billy Gil h, the morning after. Beer bottles strewn about the place, strangers sleeping on the floor, memories of a night’s worth of bad decisions filling your aching head. Such is the premise of The Lather Effect, writer-director Sarah Kelly’s first feature film. The movie hits DVD May 27, at $26.97 from Anchor Bay Entertainment. PARAMOUNT LOVES THE ’80S By Billy Gil A baggage, and the aftermath of the Besides trying to re-create the naïveparty is tempered by dealing with old té of those films, The Lather Effect also flames, marital woes and other thirty- employs the same kind of communal, something complications. party-time aspect of era films such as Fast Times at Ridgemont High. “We had about a week of rehearsal. We all got together and walked around the house, worked out scenes, hung out in the back yard and really got to know each other,” Mapother said. “We all got along very well. We had a house instead of a trailer, and it was like a dormitory or fraternity.” Kelly made sure to capture plenty of the behind-the-scenes shenanigans for the DVD’s plentiful special features, which include a making-of featurette; a commentary with Kelly, Stoltz and editor Darren Ayres; “The Cameron Effect,” a featurette about “In part it was [inspired by] a real Kelly’s obsession with writer/director party I threw, sort of an ’80s old school Cameron Crowe; and a featurette on rager,” Kelly said, sounding not unlike being a production assistant — “The Britton’s Valinda. “But also the John Hughes movies and saying we needed another one.” Stoltz, an ’80s icon who hired Kelly The film stars “Friday Night Lights’” as a production assistant in the ’90s, Connie Britton as Valinda, who de- and who served as an associate procides to reunite her high school crew ducer on The Lather Effect, agrees. “I think it’s definitely related to that for a “come as you were” party. The whole gang shows up, including the genre, and not by accident, either,” cool ex-boyfriend (William Mapother) Stoltz said. “I think Sarah and most of and the wisecracking party guy (Eric the actors have a great deal of affection Stoltz). However, with time comes for that kind of film.” aramount Home Entertainment is releasing 40 catalog titles in a new “I Love the ’80s” line of DVDs Aug. 5. The studio is partnering with VH1 (which began the “I Love the ’80s” TV series in 2002) to market and promote the line, along with ’80s music and branded merchandise. A dedicated Web site launching in July, www.the80sonDVD.com, will feature trivia, images and clips from the films. “The ‘I Love the ’80s’ brand lends itself perfectly to our vast selection of memorable films that truly impacted pop culture P at the time,” said John Kim, VP of catalog brand marketing at Paramount. The first wave will include Pretty in Pink, Beverly Hills Cop, Airplane!, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Footloose, Top Gun, Friday the 13th, Fatal Attraction, She’s Having a Baby, American Gigolo, Terms of Endearment, Urban Cowboy, and Planes, Trains & Automobiles. The $14.99 DVDs will feature retro-style O-ring packaging and will include a bonus CD with A-ha’s “Take on Me,” Echo & the Bunnymen’s “Lips Like Sugar,” INXS’ “Need You Tonight” and Erasure’s “Chains of Love.” Importance of Being An Ernest PA.” Kelly created perhaps the mother of making-of featurettes with her wellreceived documentary on Quentin Tarantino’s From Dusk Till Dawn, titled Full Tilt Boogie (available on the From Dusk Till Dawn: Dimension Collector’s Series Special Edition DVD, from Disney and Dimension). “I’m a big making-of kind of girl,” Kelly said. “The making-of is cool because it shows the real vibe on the set. It’s almost hard to believe it was that awesome, but it really was. How great everyone got along is why the movie works.” SAMAIRE ARMSTRONG MANS UP FOR ‘IT’S A BOY/GIRL THING’ By Billy Gil ooking at Samaire Armstrong, the stunning actress with the sugary voice of such TV shows as “The O.C.” and “Dirty Sexy Money,” you might not think she’s the best choice to play a man trapped in a woman’s body. She didn’t think so at first, either. But Armstrong says it was a lot more fun than she anticipated. “Sadly it wasn’t that difficult,” Armstrong said. “I was the first and only girl in my family. My dad is a very strong man and very fit, physically. My mom is very strong but also very feminine. I was born into that duality.” Armstrong ably plays opposite Kevin Zegers (Transamerica, Zoom) in It’s a Boy/Girl Thing, due out on DVD June 17 for $26.97 from Anchor Bay Entertainment. The DVD includes a making-of featurette; an interactive “Are You More Boy or Girl?” quiz; a “History of the Aztec Statue” feature; cast bios; and interviews with Armstrong, Zegers and Elton John, who, with his partner David Furnish, L produced the film. In the film, Armstrong plays a bookish, Yalebound good girl who lives next door to Zegers’ doltish jock. Add to that the class conflict of Armstrong’s character’s stuffy family versus Zegers’ down-home clan — led by Sharon Osbourne as the feisty mother — and you end up with more than a fair share of mutual enmity, with practical jokes and bitch-outs aplenty a la modern classic teen comedies such as Heathers, Clueless and Mean Girls. Of course, a curve ball comes when the two teens, on a trip to the museum, fight in front of an ancient statue that offers divine retribution in the form of switching the kids’ bodies and minds. Zegers and Armstrong spend most of the movie sabotaging each other’s characters — rich girl goes trashy and ruins her pristine rep, jock ditches his bimbo girlfriend and starts wearing sweaters and khakis. “It was harder for both myself and him to transfer back because we were so used to playing our characters,” Armstrong said. May 25–31, 2008 Home Media Magazine 35

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Home Media Magazine - May 25 - 31, 2008 Contents News Hardware Commentary TV DVD Reviews Pipeline Research Top 20 DVD Sellers Top 20 Rentals and Top 10 Charts Just Announced

Home Media Magazine - May 25 - 31, 2008

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