Meet monsters and monstrous mothers in The Bong Joon Ho Collection.
Spastically hilarious, formally adventurous, and epically ambitious South Korean director Bong Joon Ho doesn’t get the art-house credit afforded more oblique and mysterious (and often pretentious) Asian filmmakers. He’s a movie lover: a fan of monsters and cops and robbers and horror, and he’s also, at times, a goofy slapstick satirist. This set includes three of his four films: his first, relatively quiet film Barking Dogs Never Bite, the flat-out perfect monster movie The Host, and the creeptastic horror flick Mother. (The only film not included, his Beckettian cop film Memories of a Murder, is available separately, and well worth picking up.) Formally, few directors can touch the speed and grace with which he moves the camera in The Host, or touch that film’s mix of true scares and apt social metaphor. Few can balance the comedy and sadness of his brilliant crime-solving deconstruction Memories of Murder. And few can tap into the icky, primal horror he mines in Mother. But hardly any other directors can do it all.
For more, read our interview with Bong here.
Relive those heady, brainless early days of Jersey Shore: Season One Uncensored.
The cast of Jersey Shore has locked up a spot on Vulture’s Stupidest Things of the Summer list — but this set takes you way back to December 2009, when we first met these strange orange people and their very busy hot tub. (Sorry fans: The “uncensored” is, of course, just a tease. It just means less bleeping.) For our intensive Jersey Shore coverage, look here.
Get inspired by The Most Dangerous Man in America.
Can one man change the world? You betcha. Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith’s probing documentary lives up to its over-the-top title with a grand story about Daniel Ellsberg, the marine and strategist who repeatedly raised warnings about the Vietnam War. And then, when those warnings were dismissed, he released the 7,000-page Pentagon Papers, dramatically turning the tide of public opinion against the war, and precipitating the end of the war itself (not to mention Nixon’s plumber paranoia).
See Dakota Fanning play with her jailbait image in The Runaways.
Director Floria Sigismondi has delivered some stylish music videos for bands like the White Stripes and Sigur Ros, and sexy singers including Christina Aguilera and Martina Topley-Bird. But her behind-the-music biopic of Joan Jett and the Runaways couldn’t really overcome the fact that there wasn’t much of a story there. “In patches it’s agreeably lurid, but it’s otherwise ho-hum,” wrote David Edelstein, who, like many, found Dakota Fanning to be much more interesting than purported lead Kristen Stewart. “It’s Fanning’s movie: You can taste the ex-child actor’s relish for playing ‘jailbait.’ But can she be ogled in good conscience? The taste is sweet and sour.”
Learn how to make 157 feature films in Nollywood Babylon.
Every year, about 2,500 micro-budget movies are rolled out of film studios in Nigeria — and this 2008 documentary attempts to give some sense of the mad boomtown explosion of stories erupting from the country. Watch this one solely to meet self-taught independent filmmaker Lancelot Oduwa Imasuen, as he’s working on his 157th feature. Yeah, that’s right, Woody Allen: 157. How many films have you made?
Also out:
Cop Out; The Losers; Being Human: Season One; The Red Shoes; Black Narcissus; Tin Man; Galaxy of Terror; Forbidden World; Matlock: The Fifth Season.
