A clever poster mash-up of Fantastic Mr Fox and Antichrist by Sam Smyth.

And let’s not forget that YouTube mashup:

Paper Heart is a new film starring Charlyne Yi and Michael Cera as fictionalized versions of themselves in a “hybrid documentary” about love.

Directed by Nicholas Jasenovec, it also features Yi travelling across America asking various people about their experiences of love.

I spoke with Charlyne and Nicholas recently when the film screened at the London film festival last month and you can listen to the interview here:

Download audio file (Nicholas_Jasenovec_and_Charlyne_Yi_on_Paper_Heart.mp3)

You can download this interview as a podcast via iTunes by clicking here

Paper Heart is out at selected UK cinemas now

> Download the interview as an MP3 file
> Official site for Paper Heart
> Charlyne Yi and Nicholas Jasenovec at the IMDb
> Follow the movie on Twitter (@PaperHeartMovie)
> Find out more about Paper Heart at Wikipedia

NATIONAL RELEASES

A Christmas Carol (Walt Disney): An animated retelling of the Charles Dickens novel about a Victorian-era miser (Jim Carrey) taken on a journey of self-redemption, courtesy of several mysterious Christmas apparitions. Written and directed by Robert Zemeckis, it stars Carrey in a variety of roles, including Ebenezer Scrooge and the three ghosts who haunt him.

It was filmed using the performance capture techniques Zemeckis previously used in The Polar Express (2004) and Beowulf (2007). Disney will be expecting healthy box office after a big marketing push and audience familiarity with the story. [BFI IMAX, Empire Leicester Sq., Trocadero Picc Circus & Nationwide / PG]

The Men Who Stare At Goats (Momentum Pictures): Loosely adapted from Jon Ronson’s non-fiction book about a secret Army unit founded in 1979 called the ‘First Earth Battalion’ who conducted paranormal experiments, which included staring at goats in order to kill them.

The film uses a fictional framing narrative of an Ann Arbor journalist (Ewan McGregor) who hears about these strange practices when he covers the Iraq war in 2003 and encounters a former member of the unit (George Clooney).

An excellent supporting cast includes Jeff Bridges, Kevin Spacey and Stephen Lang. Although director Grant Heslov doesn’t always get the mix right between comedy and drama, there are enough funny set pieces here to chew on. Read my full thoughts on the film here.

Momentum will be hoping the starry cast will boost ticket sales but the oddness of the story and heavy competition might dent its grosses. [Coronet Notting Hill, Screen On The Green, Vue West End & Nationwide / 12A]

Bright Star (Warner Bros./Pathe): Director Jane Campion returns with this lush period drama based on the three-year romance between 19th century poet John Keats (Ben Wishaw) and Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish), which was cut short by Keats’ untimely death at age 25.

It has screened to some acclaim on the festival circuit since premièring at Cannes back in May and many are tipping it for Oscar recognition. Critical buzz and word of mouth amongst discerning audiences could help it achieve decent art house business, with multiplex crossover in some areas. [Nationwide / PG]

Jennifer’s Body (20th Century Fox): A comedy horror about a newly possessed cheerleader (Megan Fox) who turns into a killer who specializes in offing her male classmates, much to the dismay of her best friend (Amanda Seyfried).

A massive creative misfire all-round, despite the talents of screenwriter Diablo Cody (Juno) and director Karyn Kusama (Girlfight). Fox will be hoping to snare gullible teens but audiences will be disappointed when they see what a bad film it is. [Nationwide / 15]

The Fourth Kind (Entertainment): ‘Fact’ based thriller involving an ongoing unsolved mystery in Alaska, where one town has seen an extraordinary number of unexplained disappearances during the past 40 years and there are accusations of a federal cover up [Nationwide / 18]

ALSO OUT

Paper Heart (Anchor Bay UK): Charlyne Yi embarks on a quest across America to make a documentary about love.

Directed by Nicholas Jasenovec, it is a drama/documentary hybrid starring Charlyne Yi and Michael Cera as themselves. Sort of. [Odeon Panton Street & Key Cities / PG]

1 Day (Vertigo Films): The first ever British hip hop musical about a hustler named Flash set amongst young rappers in Birmingham. It should be noted that it is directed by Penny Woolcock who has made two of the worst films of all time (The Principles of Lust and Mischief Night). [Nationwide / 15]

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno (Park Circus): A part documentary and part reconstruction of the 1964 film Henri-Georges Clouzot never made. [Cine Lumiere, ICA Cinema & Key Cities / 15]

Welcome (Cinefile): Drama about a Kurdish boy from Iraq who sets off on a journey across Europe. [Curzon Renoir & selected Key Cities/ 15]

> UK cinema releases for November 2009
> DVD & Blu-ray picks for this week including Wallace and Gromit: The Complete Collection, It’s A Wonderful Life, The Proposition and The Wizard of Oz (W/C Monday 2nd November 2009)

Above is a lengthy and highly informative C-SPAN interview with Ken Auletta of The New Yorker about his new book on Google, which is called Googled: The End of the World As We Know It.

Here are some quotes and facts raised that particularly struck me:

• “Google is a surrogate (in many ways) for the Internet”
• “Google is a miraculous service for consumers but the problem is that it hurts businesses, especially media companies”
• “The Google founders start from the assumption that most things are inefficient”
• “The engineer is the content creator at Google”
• Every minute 15 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube (which includes the above interview)
• Google’s initial funding was $25 million from 7 key investors
• Adsense is essentially a Vickrey auction system and made Google $21 billion last year
• A Google data center looks like this
• Part of the reason Google are so secretive is because co-founder Larry Page once read a book about Nikolai Tesla (one of the pioneers of electricity and radio) and felt he died poor and bitter because he was too open about his inventions and secrets.
• Jeff Bezos of Amazon was an early investor in Google but this wasn’t widely known for quite a long time. His GOOG stock (if he held on to it) would be worth a $1 billion today.
• Sergey Brin suggested to Auletta that he put his book up for ‘free on the Internet’ because more people would read it that way.
• Auletta uses DropBox, which came in handy last week when his computer died.

Anyway, the whole thing is worth watching.

The new comedy horror Jennifer’s Body is out in the UK today and as it is generally my policy not waste to many words on bad films, here are some quick thoughts:

• It is really bad.
• Diablo Cody’s script shows none of the wit and feeling present in Juno
• Karyn Kusama’s direction is shocking (was this really the same person who made Girlfight?)
• Nearly all the characters are repellent and annoying, which wouldn’t be such a bad thing if done in a way that was witty or clever.
• Some of the CGI is just flat out poor
• It isn’t funny or scary

Erm… that’s it.

This Google logo to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Wallace and Gromit is rather clever.

Author Jon Krakauer is the US author who wrote the book Into the Wild, which was adapted into the 2007 film directed by Sean Penn.

In the above interview on Meet The Press he discusses his new book Where Men Win Glory, which examines the extraordinary story of Pat Tillman.

He was the US football player who gave up a highly lucrative career in order to join the US army after 9/11 and was killed in a friendly fire incident in Afghanistan during 2004.

The circumstances surrounding his death have been controversial to say the least and the current commander of US troops in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, also has an interesting role in the whole affair which raises uncomfortable questions for him and President Obama.

I wonder if Sean Penn is interested in making this book into a film?

DVD & BLU-RAY PICKS

Wallace & Gromit: The Complete Collection (2 Entertain): The most famous characters produced by Aardman Animations get the DVD & Blu-ray treatment with a box set release of A Grand Day Out (1989) which saw Wallace and Gromit fly to the moon in search of cheese; The Wrong Trousers (1993), the Oscar winning short which featured a sinister penguin lodger; and A Close Shave (1995) which involved a sheep rustling scheme.

It should be noted that the 2005 feature The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit is not on this set (presumably for rights reasons as it was co-produced with DreamWorks) but it does feature a decent selection of extras and the brand-new short A Matter Of Loaf And Death, in which the pair run a bakery but come across a mysterious plot when all the bakers in the town go missing.

For those unfamiliar with the famous characters, Gromit is the faithful canine companion of the cheese-obsessed inventor Wallace (voiced by Peter Sallis) and they are the brainchild of Nick Park, who won Oscars for the first three films. All the characters were made from moulded plasticine modelling clay on metal armatures, and filmed with stop motion clay animation.

Information about extras is a bit thin on the ground but apparently it includes:

• Audio commentaries
• Behind the scenes featurette
• Various shorts with Wallace and Gromit that were created for the internet
• A spin-off episode of Shaun the Sheep
• A scrapbook with blueprints and a photo gallery of some of the inventions

This isn’t the first time the first three shorts have been released on DVD but the big deal here is that it’s their debut on Blu-ray. [Buy it from Amazon on DVD or Blu-ray]

It’s A Wonderful Life (Universal): The perennial Christmas favourite directed by Frank Capra and starring James Stewart comes to Blu-ray and is worth getting if you don’t already own it.

The following specs for the Blu-ray are:

• Black & White Original and Colour versions
• 1080P 1.33:1 Full Screen
• English DD2.0 Mono
• English SDH subtitles
• Theatrical Trailer
• Trivia Tracker
• Picture Comparison

There will also be a new DVD release that also includes both the original and colour versions of the film, although why anyone would want to colourise a film like this is beyond me. There are reportedly no extras on the DVD, which frankly is a bit poor. [Buy it on DVD or Blu-ray]

The Proposition (Palisades Tartan): This 2005 Australian western directed by John Hillcoat and written by Nick Cave (yes, the musician) stars Guy Pearce, Ray Winstone, Emily Watson, John Hurt and Danny Huston.

Set in the Australian outback in the 1880s, the story follows the series of events following the horrific rape and murder of the Hopkins family, allegedly committed by the infamous Burns brothers gang.

Grimy but compelling, this is a timely release on Blu-ray as Hillcoat’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road will soon be seen in UK cinemas.

The Blu-ray Disc features the following extras:

• Making Of
• Trailer
• Dolby TrueHD 5.1
• DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1

The Wizard of Oz 70th Anniversary Edition (Warner): The classic musical fantasy gets the full re-release treatment on DVD and Blu-ray from Warner Bros in its 70th anniversary year.

Directed by Victor Fleming, it was based on the 1900 children’s novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum and starred Judy Garland, Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, Bert Lahr and Frank Morgan, with Billie Burke, Margaret Hamilton, Charles Grapewin, Clara Blandick and the Singer Midgets as the Munchkins.

Originally released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, it follows the story of a Kansas farmgirl Dorothy (Garland) who gets transported to the magical land of Oz where she encounters all manner of characters including the Good Witch of the North (Billie Burke), Scarecrow (Ray Bolger), Tin Man (Jack Haley) and a Cowardly Lion (Bert Lahr) and the Wicked Witch of the West (Margaret Hamilton).

Although successful when it was originally released the songs from the film became huge, with “Over the Rainbow” nabbing the Oscar for Best Original Song and the film itself garnering several nominations, including Best Picture.

However, the film became permanently embedded in popular culture when it was screened every year on US television from 1959 to 1991, becoming one of the most watched films of all time.

The UK DVD and Blu-ray Disc release is a newly remastered version with a raft of new extrasand a sing-along feature.

* For a great rundown of the picture quality and technical details of this Blu-ray transfer check out the review of the US disc on DVD Beaver *

It is available on 1-Disc DVD (£12.99 RRP), 4-Disc DVD (£19.99 RRP, HMV Exclusive) and 3-Disc Blu-ray (£22.99 RRP).

The extras on the different versions are outlined below:

Collector’s Edition Sing-Along Version – 3 Discs BLU-RAY Release (2 BDs, 1 DVD Sing-Along)

• Blu-ray Disc 1: Main Feature
• Remastered feature with 5.1 Audio
• 1080P 1.33:1
• English 5.1 Dolby TrueHD
• English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese DD1.0 Mono
• English HOH, French, German HOH, Italian, Italian HOH, Spanish, Dutch, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish subtitles (Film & Extras except commentary)
• Commentary by Historian John Fricke including archival interviews of the film’s cast and crew
• Music and Effects Track
• Original mono Track
• Sing-Along Audio Feature
• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: The Making of a Movie Classic [1990 TV special]
• Because of the Wonderful Things it Does: The Legacy of Oz
• Memories of Oz [2001 TCM documentary]
• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz Storybook
• Prettier than ever: The Restoration of Oz
• We Haven’t Really Met Properly”" Supporting Cast Profiles
• Audio Jukebox Selection
• Leo Is on the Air Radio Promo
• Good News of 1939 Radio Show
• 12/25/1950 Lux Radio Theater Broadcast
• Another Romance of Celluloid: Electrical Power
• Calvacade of the Academy Awards Excerpt
• Texas Contest Winners
• Off to See the Wizard Excerpts
• Stills Galleries
• 6 Trailers
• Harold Arlen’s Home Movies
• Outtakes and Deleted Scenes
• It’s a Twister! It’s a Twister! The Tornado Tests

Blu-ray Disc 2: Extra Features

• Subtitles: English, French, German, Italian, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, Russian (+ 3 others my player reports as numbers)
• Victor Fleming: Master Craftsman (NEW)
• L. Frank Baum: The Man Behind the Curtain
• Celebrating Hollywood’s Biggest Little Stars (NEW)
• The Dreamer of Oz [1990 TV special] (NEW)
• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1910 short)
• His Majesty, The Scarecrow of Oz [1914 feature]
• The Magic Cloak of Oz [1914 short] (NEW)
• The Patchwork Girl of Oz [1914] (NEW)
• The Wizard of Oz [1925 feature]
• The Wizard of Oz [1933 animated short]

Disc 3: DVD Main Feature & Sing-along

• Sing-Along Version – 1 DVD Disc Release
• Re-mastered feature with Dolby Digital 5.1 Audio
• Commentary by Historian John Fricke including archival interviews of the film’s cast and crew
• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz Storybook
• Prettier than ever: The Restoration of Oz
• We Haven’t Really Met Properly – Supporting Cast Profiles
• Music and Effects Track
• Original mono Track
• Sing-Along Tracks
• Trailers

Collector’s Edition Sing-Along Version – 4 Discs DVD Release

• Remastered feature with Dolby Digital 5.1 Audio
• Commentary by Historian John Fricke including archival interviews of the film’s cast and crew
• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz Storybook
• Prettier than ever: The Restoration of Oz
• We Haven’t Really Met Properly”" Supporting Cast Profiles
• Music and Effects Track
• Original mono Track
• Sing-Along Audio Feature
• Trailers
• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: The Making of a Movie Classic [1990 TV special]
• Memories of Oz [2001 TCM documentary]
• The Art of Imagination: A Tribute to Oz
• Because of the Wonderful Things it Does: The Legacy of Oz
• Harold Arlen’s Home Movies
• Outtakes and Deleted Scenes
• It’s a Twister! It’s a Twister! The Tornado Tests
• Off to See the Wizard
• 3 Vault Shorts
• Audio Jukebox Selections
• Still Galleries
• 6 Theatrical Trailers
• L. Frank Baum: The Man Behind the Curtain
• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz [1910 short]
• The Magic Cloak of Oz [1914 short] RT 53:10
• His Majesty, The Scarecrow of Oz [1914 feature]
• The Wizard of Oz [1925 feature]
• The Wizard of Oz [1933 animated short]
• Hollywood Celebrates its Biggest Little Stars!
• The Dreamer of Oz 1990 TV Special
• Victor Flemming: Master Craftsman
• DVD Sing Along version

ALSO OUT

‘Allo ‘Allo: The Complete Collection (Universal Playback)
All Creatures Great and Small: The Complete Collection (Universal Playback)
Blood: The Last Vampire (Pathe)
Boogie (Dogwoof)
Family Guy Season 8 (Fox)
Frank Borzage Volume 1 (BFI)
Frank Borzage Volume 2 (BFI)
Hi-De-Hi: The Complete Collection (Universal Playback)
Last Chance Harvey (Momentum)
Peep Show Series 6 (4DVD)
Public Enemies (Universal)
Samurai Princess (4Digital Asia)
Star Wars: The Clone Wars Season 1 (Warner)
Supernatural Season 4 (Warner)
Year One (Sony)
36 (Palisades Tartan)
A Tale of Two Sisters (Palisades Tartan)
Black Book (Palisades Tartan)
Braveheart (Fox)
Godzilla (Sony)
I Sell The Dead (Anchor Bay)
It’s A Wonderful Life (Universal)
Lady Vengeance (Palisades Tartan)
Santa Claus: The Movie (Optimum)
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Disney)
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (Palisades Tartan)
The Grinch (Universal)
The Polar Express 3-D (Warner)
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (Warner)

> UK DVD & Blu-ray Releases for November 2009
> Browse more DVD Releases at Amazon UK and Play
> Check the latest DVD prices at DVD Price Check
> Take a look at the current UK cinema releases (W/C Friday 30th October)

A Flickr slideshow of photos I took during this year’s London Film Festival.

Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s director Alex Cox presented a series of cult films on BBC2 called Moviedrome.

It started in 1988 with The Wicker Man and the above video is his introduction to the film.