Jahnke's Electric Theatre
In the fall of 2015, Cary Fukunaga’s Beasts of No Nation debuted at the Venice International Film Festival where it was acquired for distribution by Netflix for a whopping $12 million. The film went on to rack up an impressive list of awards and nominations, many singling out Idris Elba’s powerful supporting performance as the Commandant of a battalion of child soldiers. It appeared on several critics’ year-end top ten lists, including, among others, Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune, Drew McWeeny (then at HitFix), and Erin Whitney of ScreenCrush. It is “certified fresh” by review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes with an enviable 91% standing on Ye Olde TomatoMeter. It also made less than a million dollars at the box office, received zero Academy Award nominations, and, as of spring 2017, is not available on Blu-ray or DVD. You probably haven’t thought of it at all in at least a year. [Read on here...]
On April 7, 2000, we posted my very first piece for The Digital Bits. It was a review of Joe Dante’s Piranha on DVD from New Concorde Home Entertainment. I don’t have that disc today. It’s been upgraded and replaced by Shout! Factory’s Blu-ray. New Concorde’s not even around anymore. Now it’s New Horizons and they’re not in the home entertainment business themselves. Things change. [Read on here...]
(If it can be difficult to remember who won the Academy Award for Best Picture, it’s downright mindbending trying to remember everything else it was up against. In An Honor To Be Nominated, I’ll be taking a look back at some of the movies the Oscar didn’t go to and trying to determine if they were robbed, if the Academy got it right, or if they should ever have been nominated in the first place.) [Read on here...]
(If it can be difficult to remember who won the Academy Award for Best Picture, it’s downright mindbending trying to remember everything else it was up against. In An Honor To Be Nominated, I’ll be taking a look back at some of the movies the Oscar didn’t go to and trying to determine if they were robbed, if the Academy got it right, or if they should ever have been nominated in the first place.) [Read on here...]
(If it can be difficult to remember who won the Academy Award for Best Picture, it’s downright mindbending trying to remember everything else it was up against. In An Honor To Be Nominated, I’ll be taking a look back at some of the movies the Oscar didn’t go to and trying to determine if they were robbed, if the Academy got it right, or if they should ever have been nominated in the first place.) [Read on here...]