White Dog
Samuel Fuller's follow-up to The Big Red One was shelved by Paramount Pictures before its scheduled release in 1982 because of fears that its premise -- a white dog has been trained to attack black people -- would stir up more controversy than box office. Fuller was understandably outraged; in his autobiography, A Third Face, he wrote: "The studio has used me as a scapegoat for their lack of determination and courage." The film, co-written by Curtis Hanson (LA Confidential), with a score by the legendary Ennio Morricone, later received acclaim when it was released in Europe but never received a home video release in the US and has rarely been seen here. Kristy McNichol plays an actress who adopts the dog; Paul Winfield is as an anthropologist who tries to reverse the training. The Criterion Collection DVD includes a featurette with Hanson, producer Jon Davison, and Fuller's widow, plus a print interview with the dog trainer and essays by J. Hoberman and Armond White. I'm buying, but even if you're not a huge fan of Samuel Fuller, you'd want to check it out. Rent it.

Step Brothers
Combining Will Farrell, John C. Reilly, Richard Jenkins, and Mary Steenburgen under one roof, Step Brothers mines familiar territory with sharp timing and plenty of belly laughs. Mine is, admittedly, a distinctly minority opinion. Available on DVD (single-disc rated, single-disc unrated, two-disc unrated) and Blu-ray, with an audio commentary by Farrell, Reilly, director Adam McKay, and a score by Jon Brion. Other features include deleted scenes and alternate takes, a gag reel, 'making of,' and a couple of gag featurettes. Rent it.

Much more on Wanted, The X-Files: I Want to Believe, and The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian after the jump, plus Indies on DVD, Blu-ray Picks, and Collector's Corner.

It's a thorny dilemma, both legally and morally -- fittingly, the kind of story that, were it turned into a movie, might win a couple Oscars itself. The question is this: Does the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have the legal right to buy back an Oscar winner's statuette if he or she (or his or her heirs) decides to get rid of it? What if the Oscar winner wants to sell it at auction and donate the money to charity? Can the Academy in good conscience demand return of the statuette and deprive the charity of those funds? See? Thorny!

For Academy Award winners since 1950, the legalities are fairly uncomplicated. The minute you win the sucker, you have to sign a contract saying that if you or your heirs ever decide you don't want the trophy anymore, the Academy has the right to buy it back for $10. That's the Academy's way of preventing the devaluation of the statuette. If any old schmo with a few hundred thousand dollars could "win" an Oscar at Jack Nicholson's garage sale, the prize would lose all meaning. As it is, of course, winning an Oscar is the single greatest achievement that a human being can ever hope to accomplish -- and the Academy wants to keep it that way.

The issue that's about to go before a Los Angeles judge and jury is what should happen to the best actress Oscar that Mary Pickford won for 1929's Coquette. (That's Pickford and the troublesome trophy in the picture.) The Academy didn't have the first-dibs rule back then -- but when Pickford won an honorary Oscar in 1976, she signed the agreement, and the Academy says that contract was retroactive to include her earlier trophy, too.

A few years ago, I wrote a Cinematical Seven on my favorite dysfunctional families in films. Everyone has a crazy messed-up movie family they love, whether it's the Hoovers in Little Miss Sunshine or the Bullocks in My Man Godfrey or the Corleones in the Godfather saga. I thought that this year, it would be fun to make a list of families that got along, worked together, and supported one another. You know, happy families ... but not dull, one-dimensional bundles of endless cheer.

It's a lot more difficult to find seven movies with happy-but-not-sappy families than it is to find the screwed-up kind, especially if you are looking for something more interesting than the Cleavers. Since I'm visiting my relatives for the Thanksgiving holidays, I asked them for suggestions. They were all very helpful, and I'm sorry I couldn't include all the suggestions, which ranged from The Thin Man to The Sound of Music to The Hills Have Eyes. Let me know what else we missed in the comments.

Toss this one right into the "unproven" files, but it's amusing enough to warrant some exploration: According to this tabloid (along with The Guardian and our pals at Spout), it seems that spouses Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes may be gearing up to remake Bernardo Bertolucci's controversially sexy romance drama Last Tango in Paris. The last time we saw Tom Cruise nail a spouse on camera was in 1999's Eyes Wide Shut, and I'm sure he probably groped Mimi Rogers in a movie once or twice. (Say what you like, but the guy does have good taste in women.)

"They need to have sex on screen, to prove their love" is what The Guardian's Xan Brooks had to say, which only serves to make the whole thing sound more like an April Fool's gag. The paragon of journalism that is Now Magazine indicates that the couple simply wants to star together in something sexy. I believe the title Basic Instinct was tossed out as an example. Yikes. In Mr. Brooks' tongue-in-cheek piece, he proposes a remake of Betty Blue. Double yikes. But if this entirely goofball story turns out to be 100% true, and Cruise / Holmes are intent on making a "sek-say" remake together ... Lolita makes a little more sense. Or maybe The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Seriously, that I'd go see.

But the question of the day is now this: Does it creep you out to see married couples "doin' it" in a movie? Hmmm, I think I smell a new Cinematical Seven topic.

Have you ever seen an animated film called Arabian Knight? Or The Princess and the Cobbler? If so then you witnessed the final resting place of one man's life work. His name is Richard Williams, he's a brilliant animator, and the story of how it took over twenty years for his labor of love to be completed, released, and mangled is pretty fascinating. Not to mention heart-wrenching. You can read the full history of the ill-fated project right here, but the short version is this: After more than two decades of development, sweat, and stress, Williams lost the rights to his baby and they eventually ended up in the hands of the Weinsteins. The result was Arabian Knight, which came and went with little fanfare.

BUT! Through the magic of Google Video and the passionate efforts of one fan, you can now see a fairly close approximation to the film that Mr. Williams intended. Yep, it's feature-length, unfinished in some parts, but pretty damn cool overall. Especially if you're a big animtion nut, but those folks have seen this "recobbled" cut by now, I'm sure. (And I hope I'm not getting this guy in trouble, but he's also posted full-length versions of two other animated obscurities: Raggedy Ann and Andy: A Musical Adventure (1977) and Twice Upon a Time (1983)!)

And yep, this is "old news" to some ... but it wasn't to me.

With the news that the musical score from The Dark Knight has been disqualified from Academy Awards consideration on the grounds that too many people were credited with composing it, outrage against the Academy's stringent, complicated rules has erupted afresh. In the interest of fueling this indignation and making the world an angrier place, let's take a belligerent march down memory lane and look at seven other controversial disqualifications.

The Jazz Singer disqualified for being a talkie. When the very first Academy Awards were held in May 1929, honoring films released between August 1927 and July 1928, everyone was talking about The Jazz Singer -- the first feature-length movie to use recorded sound in some of its talking and singing scenes. So great was the attention that the Academy disqualified the film from the inaugural Best Picture category, reasoning that its use of sound put it on an uneven playing field against the films still stuck in silence. Instead, the Academy gave Warner Bros. a special award "for producing The Jazz Singer, the pioneer outstanding talking picture, which has revolutionized the industry." It's true, too! I don't know if you've noticed, but pretty much all movies nowadays have talking in them.

Young Americans disqualified from Best Documentary category ... after it already won. Whoops. This is a sad case, and a unique one. The documentary, about the peppy Young Americans show choir, won the Oscar at the 1969 ceremony for being the best feature-length documentary of 1968. But a few weeks later, the Academy discovered that the film had screened at a theater in October 1967, making it eligible for that year's awards and not for 1968. The Academy actually took back the Oscar statues from the filmmakers, Alex Grasshoff and Robert Cohn, and gave the award to the film that had been first runner-up. When Grasshoff died earlier this year, his widow told the Los Angeles Times how heartbroken he'd been. Can you imagine?

"It was all a dream! It was all a dream! It was all probably a coke-induced dream!"

My friend pointed me towards this clever YouTube video by the Fine Brothers, in which the duo do exactly what they set out to: reveal one hundred movie endings within four minutes. It's like the logical extension to that spoiler T-shirt that made the rounds a while back, and while the Meg Ryan streak they demonstrate (you'll see) is telling enough (not to mention the sports movie bits), I could see them pulling pretty much off the same thing with Drew Barrymore -- not that it's their fault, more so the industry's. (Oh, and this video is pretty much exactly what I get for not having seen Wild Things by this point in my life.)

And for those so inclined as to watch the same thing, only with the brothers naked, click here and, um, enjoy. (SPOILER ALERT! They're not wearing clothes!)

It's been two months since we heard anything about the Leonardo DiCaprio-produced Akira. This is a remake that has caused a bit of upset in our comments, as initial reports suggested DiCaprio was set to star alongside Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

However, Gordon-Levitt denied having any connection to the film, and now DiCaprio has clarified his involvement. In an interview with MTV's Splash Page, he denied that he was going to be starring in Akira, nor will he be playing any part in Ninja Scroll (which he just optioned a few weeks ago). He made it clear that his only involvement is as producer, via his Appian Way banner.

So, where does Akira stand in pre-production? Remember, this was once being fast-tracked for a summer 2009 release, which it's obviously not going to make. But that's because DiCaprio is making sure this is handled right: "We're waiting for the final draft of the script. I'm a big fan of Japanese anime ... I know there a lot of loyal fans out there of the project and die-hard fans, so we're going to try to do the best job we possibly can and we're not going to make the movie until the script is in the right shape."

If only big fans could be the producers on every beloved property, no fans would ever lose sleep. Are you slightly reassured, now? And hey, post your Akira dream cast. DiCaprio knows you're out there, and he might just listen.

The remake of The Forbidden Planet has danced around Hollywood for years, with various big names like James Cameron dropping in and out of the project. Now it's finally moving forward at Warner Bros, with determined producer Joel Silver at the production helm, and the ever-popular J. Michael Straczynski penning the script. Still, it was news that wasn't welcome to several of our readers, which is understandable. It's a sci-fi classic, and beloved by many.

Well, this might ease your fears a little bit. The gang over at Ain't It Cool News snagged some exclusive details. Apparently, Straczynski's script will be more of a continuation, or a companion piece, than an actual remake. It's possible the new movie retcons the story a bit, and leaves Altair 4 intact and alive. The beloved Robby the Robot will be in it, and the movie will be "an enormous, giant, retro sci-fi movie ... nothing sleek or 'chromy'" in its visuals.

If you were a Babylon 5 fan, you know Straczynski's love for the original film runs as deep as anyone else's. It sounds like he's trying to do right by the story, and yet give fans a little something new. If it's a movie that continues the nightmares of the original, I think that could be pretty darn cool, and a nice break from the reboots and outright remakes that are taking over Hollywood. But, let's turn it over to you Planet fans in the comments, and see if this softens the blow, or just rubs salt in the wound.