Joe Dante

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domino harvey
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Re: Joe Dante

#51 Post by domino harvey » Sun Jan 24, 2010 11:06 am

In a year filled with bad news, here's some good: Universal is releasing Matinee on May 4 as a real DVD =D>

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stereo
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Re: Joe Dante

#52 Post by stereo » Sun Jan 24, 2010 1:11 pm

domino harvey wrote:In a year filled with bad news, here's some good: Universal is releasing Matinee on May 4 as a real DVD =D>
Well of course it will; I mean I just shelled out for the oop WS disc, so it was inevitable! Maybe Shout Factory will get Hollywood Blvd. re-released, although it doesn't seem to be on their initial list of announcements. No one critiques American consumerism more subversively than Dante IMO.

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Re: Joe Dante

#53 Post by ineedyoubad » Sun Jan 24, 2010 8:47 pm

domino harvey wrote:In a year filled with bad news, here's some good: Universal is releasing Matinee on May 4 as a real DVD =D>
That is great news, It is one of my favorite movie.

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Re: Joe Dante

#54 Post by domino harvey » Sun May 02, 2010 3:09 pm

Trailer for Dante's the Hole, which God bless it looks like is trying to singlehandedly bring the good kids' movies of the 80s/early 90s back into vogue

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Re: Joe Dante

#55 Post by ianungstad » Sun May 02, 2010 3:32 pm

It looks like a lot of fun. It doesn't seem to have a US distributor yet, which is a bit surprising.

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knives
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Re: Joe Dante

#56 Post by knives » Sun May 02, 2010 3:38 pm

Now that's something worth the 3-D. That trailer really makes it feel like Dante never left us.

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Alphonse Doinel
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Re: Joe Dante

#57 Post by Alphonse Doinel » Sun May 02, 2010 5:07 pm

Looks like an episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Considering its Dante, I do have hope for this.

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Re: Joe Dante

#58 Post by Cold Bishop » Sun May 02, 2010 6:06 pm

I don't have much faith for this connecting with mainstream audiences, but it does look fun.

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JamesF
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Re: Joe Dante

#59 Post by JamesF » Sun May 02, 2010 9:28 pm

Luckily for us UK folk, The Hole does have distribution here and is coming out in August. Can't wait!

The Matinee DVDs released tomorrow, isn't it? Any word on extra features?

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Forrest Taft
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Re: Joe Dante

#60 Post by Forrest Taft » Tue May 18, 2010 4:59 pm

DVD Savant interviews Joe Dante on the DVD release of Matinee.
Joe Dante wrote:At one point there was nothing more left to come out (on DVD) but Matinee, which had never come out on a decent format. I was sort of hoping Criterion might pick it up, but that was not to be. And so I kept calling Universal every couple of months and I would say, "I want you guys to remember that if you put Matinee out please call me because I have all this extra stuff I want to put in. And then I read on the Internet last year that Matinee is coming out and has a date. I call them up and they say, "Whup, it's too late. It's in the works now; it's too late to add anything. Maybe when it goes out on Blu-ray.
Disappointing Criterion didn´t want to release this. I guess they´re too busy raiding the James Schamus catalog.

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domino harvey
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Re: Joe Dante

#61 Post by domino harvey » Tue Jun 08, 2010 9:10 pm

Watched Matinee tonite. I am pretty sure I saw this and liked it when it came out but I guess ten year olds aren't the best at remembering movies they only see once, so it was pretty much a new experience for me. It's a bit of a slow-starter, but there are a lot of period details that are keenly observed and especially I loved the girl of the liberal parents screaming to all the kids doing duck and cover about how they'll throw up their bloody internal organs! But man, any faults in the windup are extinguished by the pitch, and the last half of the film is like the ultimate movie theatre fetishist wet dream. Gotta love that amazing dialog in MANT! too. My favorite: "You can't drop an atomic bomb on Chicago!" The juvenile romances in the film are all pretty cute, the bits of action are well done, and it strikes me that it'd make a good double feature with another period "kid's movie" from 1993 that holds up better for adults, the Sandlot.

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domino harvey
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Re: Joe Dante

#62 Post by domino harvey » Thu Jun 17, 2010 4:49 pm

Caught up with Dante's Runaway Daughters, a throwback Showtime TV film from '94 written by Matinee/Gremlins 2 scribe Charlie Haas. It has a great cast with most of the Dante regulars, including Dick Miller, who seems to be having the most fun here, but also Julie Bowen, Paul Rudd, Cathy Moriarty, and Jenny Lewis from Rilo Kiley (who looks exactly like Carey Mulligan here). But the film doesn't really live up to its cast or its pedigree and amounts to little more than a trifle about fifties teens who stage a kidnapping to cover up for their road trip to hunt down the boy who knocked up one of the trio. I wanted to like the film a lot more than I did, as the ingredients are there for a killer comedy that never materializes. There is one excellent joke though. One of the girls (I think it's Lewis) is having an argument with her mom while walking home and she caps her argument by running into the front door of her house and whoops, wrong house. Cut to a shot of a street of identical track houses. More touches like that and maybe it wouldn't look so much like what it is: a forgettable made-for-TV movie

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domino harvey
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Re: Joe Dante

#63 Post by domino harvey » Sat Oct 30, 2010 5:14 pm

Well, the board hack lost my posts about several of the Dante films I saw this summer, so those are only readable in the Henry Gibson-run department of lost items. I'm not rewriting my longer posts, but the basic reactions were something like:

Looney Tunes: Back in Action: Pretty funny first act that tapers off into general amusement. That it works at all is surprising given I'm not a big Looney Tunes fan to begin with.

Gremlins/Gremlins 2: the New Batch: The first film falls surprisingly flat all these years after I'd last seen it as a child, but the sequel's Tashlin-indebted zaniness and novelty overshadows its flaws.

Small Soldiers Adept little comic actioner with a strong cynical tone, particularly in the ending where money is proven to overcome all ills, even by the protagonists. Complaints of violence seem absurd in retrospect given how the market for children has deteriorated so rapidly.

Recently, I've had a chance to visit and revisit some more Dante. 'Tis the season and what not. First up Explorers, which seems like it would have been a movie I should have seen as a kid but didn't. It's a strange film, and the tone is a little hard to gauge. I thought the picture worked best with the smaller, more observant moments, like how one of the boys uses the alien device to... see inside his crush's window, or how it's the kid with the abusive father who immediately recognizes the aliens' family dynamic. But that third act is so bald and obvious that it doesn't work as satire or social commentary and the film only recovers from the finale in the credits sequence, which means it might as well not have bothered.

Speaking of poorly-functioning satire, I thought Homecoming was kind of awful and full of ham-fisted, liberal-baiting jibes at the Iraq war. As far as its effectiveness as political commentary, forget about it. I mostly share the pic's ideology, but there's something to be said for a defter touch (or a smarter one).

But then I revisited Eerie, Indiana and all of Dante's strengths once more came into focus. With Halloween here, it seemed like the perfect time to take a nostalgia trip back to this short-lived show. I still remember watching the first episode with my mom and she loved it so much that she decided we needed to record every episode thereafter, which means I had a nice tape collection of every episode that aired on NBC during its original run as a kid to watch over and over. I probably hadn't seen any of these episodes since fourth grade, but revisiting the series now as an adult, it holds up remarkably well to the trap of nostalgia.

Dante didn't create the series, but he set its tone by directing three of the first four episodes (five total in the series) and guest starred in a sixth. Most people who grew up on this series, myself included, go to the first two episodes as the immediate markers of the series, and yes, the "Foreverware" and retainer escapades remain quite effective, but I was surprised to find my new favorite of all the Dante-directed episodes was Heart on a Chain, which takes a more serious tack than most of the series and stands amongst the best things Dante's ever done. The story itself isn't particularly original or compelling, but it's how Dante maneuvers all the elements and uses his young cast to contrast the trappings of a child's first relationship with the tragedy of early death and the overcompensation of grief that makes this a first-rate outing. It's so good that I kind of would like to see Dante do a movie focusing on preteen characters absent of the supernatural or extraordinary (Matinee comes the next-closest, I guess)-- he could add a much-needed observant voice to the cinematically-underrepresented middle school years of life!

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Roger Ryan
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Re: Joe Dante

#64 Post by Roger Ryan » Mon Nov 01, 2010 4:32 pm

Domino - You may want to avoid TRAPPED ASHES as you peruse Dante's oeuvre! Now, Dante was obviously working with a really weak script here, but he seems to have no clue how to direct the action to make even a little sense. By making all the wrong choices (along with an over-reliance on a wide angle lens) this has to be the shoddiest work he's ever done. Alas, Dick Miller makes an appearance for those who wonder if Dante had any input at all.

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domino harvey
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Re: Joe Dante

#65 Post by domino harvey » Wed Jan 05, 2011 10:20 pm

The Hole gets a Blu-ray release on January 17th in the UK and with no hope of distribution on this side of the pond, I'm taking the plunge

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Re: Joe Dante

#66 Post by Forrest Taft » Thu Jan 06, 2011 10:16 am

I've pre-ordered the blu-ray, but according to The Digital Fix, the DVD-edition from the same company is not so hot. I hope they do a better job on the BD. There is also a 2 disc blu-ray edition from Italy, including both the 2D and the 3D versions. It costs more than the UK edition, which I why I haven't bought it. Curious about the 3D version though, and what it's like watching a 3D movie in my living room...

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Re: Joe Dante

#67 Post by Dylan » Thu Jan 06, 2011 6:04 pm

As Dante has said in many interviews about "The Hole," it's trying to recapture the feel of a 1980s kid's horror film. Sadly, the result is my least favorite Dante film. But Dante was a hired hand on this, the financing was already set and the cameras were ready to roll once he accepted the offer after being sent the script. He has said in interviews how many bad scripts he gets sent (in once interview he described most of them of "slasher" or "gore" movies "without a sense of humor" in interviews), but I have a really hard time believing that "The Hole" was the best script that's been offered to him (for a surefire production) in the last decade. But maybe that's true, and if it is that's unfortunate. I love Joe Dante and he's so much better than this.

To Dante's credit, all of the performances are excellent (he really does know how to direct children well), especially Bruce Dern chewing up the scenery in his few minutes. The underground "light bulb room" is a neat visual. Dick Miller shows up for all of five or six seconds without a line of dialogue, but it's Dick Miller so it's great to see him.

My best guess is this will make it to US as a direct to DVD/Blu Ray in a year's time. It's great that Dante made another film, but he needs to be getting better scripts offered to him than this.
Last edited by Dylan on Wed Apr 03, 2019 12:57 pm, edited 3 times in total.

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Re: Joe Dante

#68 Post by colinr0380 » Thu Jan 06, 2011 6:54 pm

domino harvey wrote:The Hole gets a Blu-ray release on January 17th in the UK and with no hope of distribution on this side of the pond, I'm taking the plunge
There's a review of the disc here.

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domino harvey
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Re: Joe Dante

#69 Post by domino harvey » Thu Jan 20, 2011 7:41 pm

Did take the UK Blu plunge (it looks fine, I think the linked review saying the disc was a dog was for the SD disc). While I agree that it is near-impossible to envision the Hole getting a theatrical rollout in the states, I'm much more forgiving of the film's faults than Dylan! It's weird antiquated nature makes it a strange creature, one that it's impossible to figure out the audience for: Are little kids going to want to see a film that essentially addresses repressed/suppressed childhood trauma memories such as abuse and accidental death? Are teenagers going to appreciate the wonderful, vibrant "normalcy" of the leads (Please, Dante, direct a straight film about ninth graders interacting in their everyday fashion, it would be your masterpiece! [Because Joe Dante reads what I write here, of course]) and somewhat hokey horror elements? Are adults going to have the nineties kid background to really see what Dante's film is doing here, which is essentially provide the Goosebumps movie that never happened? Probably/definitely not. It's a total curio, but one that left me totally charmed, maybe even moreso by virtue of its wholly esoteric target. C'mon, it's impossible to hate any movie that has its young protagonists camping out in a Christmas light-lit basement, wearing face guards and wielding household weapons against an unseen enemy!

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Re:

#70 Post by dad1153 » Fri Jan 28, 2011 6:23 pm

HypnoHelioStaticStasis wrote:And yet another thing I love about Dante: his dvd commentaries. They're very production oriented, but he talks incessantly and in a very entertaining way. He also works well with other people in the booth, giving them a lot of time to shine. His commentaries on the Gremlins films are classic.
He's also good at doing commentaries on other people's movies. Watched George Pal's "War of the Worlds" on DVD for the first time this morning. Loved it (Spielberg's version is so weak and vanilla now that I've experienced the real deal), and then during lunch I re-watched the movie with Dante, Bob Burns and Bill Warren commenting on it. Dante's knowledge and love of these types of movies comes through when he starts talking, unprompted, about the career of Bob Cornthwaite (Carrington in "The Thing from Another World" and one of the scientists in "War...")) and what a disappointment to him it was that Cornthwaite didn't parlay his great role on "The Thing..." into stardom. Between "War of the Worlds," hearing Dante & friends on the "War..." DVD commentary and love for "Gremlins" and "Innerspace" (two of my favorite movies growing up) I might just have enough strength to open the new DVD of "Gremlins 2" I bought several years ago that I have yet to watch (saw it once on HBO in 1990 or '91 and I remember not liking it). Never seen "The Twilight Zone" movie, "Small Soldiers," "Matinee" or his "Looney Tunes" movies. Guess I gotta keep an eye out now for TV showings and/or eBay (I don't rent).

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Dylan
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Re: Joe Dante

#71 Post by Dylan » Fri Feb 11, 2011 7:00 pm

From Joe Dante's Facebook page:
Looks like after all these years I'm going to get to revisit werewolves --with the addition of vampires! MONSTER LOVE is next.

I've never done a vampire movie, so this combination is going to be fun. Greg Pak has written a classical monster movie with plenty of humor, action, scares and a bunch of great parts for actors young and old.... We're hoping to shoot this fall for release next summer.

Details as they happen!
Sounds like fun.

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Re: Joe Dante

#72 Post by Markson » Sat Feb 12, 2011 6:38 pm

More details on the above here.

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Re: Joe Dante

#73 Post by Kaseykockroach » Fri Apr 22, 2011 3:53 am

I must confess, until my high school years, I never got into live-action stuff. I was a pure cartoon geek, purely interested in classic animation. My love for B-monster movies was always there, but I rarely watched REAL movies so to speak. As I got older, I found myself beginning to discover more and more real films (I've suffered so much of what modern cinema has to offer *sobs over-dramatically*).. Alfred Hitchcock, Frank Tashlin, Billy Wilder, Marx Brothers, Laurel & Hardy, Three Stooges, Abbot & Costello, etc. I felt ashamed and embarrassed it's took me this long to discover classic films.
And yet, much to my initial embarrassment, it was discovering Joe's filmography that's really gotten me excited and eager to see more. It wasn't until I found this thread that I found, it's perfectly okay to own Piranha on DVD in the same DVD wallet where I keep Citizen Kane (though whether or not it's healthy to consider him my favorite film director is still undecided. All of his films so far seem to 'click' with me so to speak, as if his stuff was made for me. His only weak film so far for me, has been Looney Tunes: Back in Action, which at least has the Louvre sequence and Jerry Goldsmith's final score). I can't analyze why I love his movies, I just do. Gremlins 2: The New Batch is probably in my top 5 favorite films.
Anyhow, I thank this forum for making me feel a little better about my Joe Dante kick lately. Though, I must ask you folks...Innerspace, Explorers and The Howling (the only of his films I haven't revisited yet) are in my Netflix queue, but I can't decide which one to pick next. Which of these three do you recommend?

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Roger Ryan
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Re: Joe Dante

#74 Post by Roger Ryan » Fri Apr 22, 2011 11:27 am

Kaseykockroach wrote:Though, I must ask you folks...Innerspace, Explorers and The Howling (the only of his films I haven't revisited yet) are in my Netflix queue, but I can't decide which one to pick next. Which of these three do you recommend?
All three are pretty good, so I would recommend watching them in the order of release. THE HOWLING is a send-up of horror films similar to PIRANHA with good make-up effects by Rob Bottin, who was criticized at the time of the film's release for "stealing" ideas from his mentor Rick Baker who was working on AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON at the same time. Dante's film turned out to be just as good as Landis' film in its own way. EXPLORERS is probably Dante's most personal project and contains some wonderfully whimsical ideas. Unfortunately, Dante ran out of money and could not shoot the final quarter of the film as planned, so it ends a little abruptly. INNERSPACE basically beats Zemeckis at his own game with a fun movie filled with odd little moments.

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domino harvey
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Re: Joe Dante

#75 Post by domino harvey » Wed May 04, 2011 10:02 pm

Apparently France released a Blu-ray of Matinee?! NO FIXED SUBS and it includes Mant!

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