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What to Netflix: New DVD Tuesday

BuzzSugar — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 07:30:00 -0700

All of the new DVD releases hit stores (and Netflix) on Tuesdays. So each week in What to Netflix: New DVD Tuesday, I sort through the best of the batch and tell you what to add to your queue. In addition to the titles below, you can also rent Reservation Road (not to be confused with Revolutionary Road), and Leonardo DiCaprio's global warming warning, The 11th Hour.

There Will Be Blood
This April is a great month for renting DVDs because a new stellar, Oscar-nominated film seems to come out every week. Today's release is the stirring Paul Thomas Anderson masterpiece, There Will Be Blood. The film is loosely based on Upton Sinclair's novel Oil! and follows the story of an ambitious oil man, Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) as he becomes one of those famed self-made American magnates, a la William Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie.

If you haven't heard by now that this film is both visually stunning and soul-stirring, and that Daniel Day-Lewis gives the Oscar-winning performance of the year, then you've had a very distracting year. I stuck this movie on my April must-haves list not only because of its classic story of greed vs. compassion, but also because Day-Lewis only seems to emerge to knock one out of the park every five years or so, which in Hollywood years can seem like a lifetime. You'll want to own this one to get you through to 2013 when he's had enough of shoe-making on the Italian Coast or something and decides to show the rest of those amateurs how it's done. Again.

For two more titles that couldn't be more different than each other,

The 11th Hour: We Are All Doomed

BuzzSugar — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 14:45:16 -0700

The apocalyptic documentary The 11th Hour is dreary in tone and drab in execution. It's basically a series of talking heads alternating with images of everything from industrial progress to scenes of famine to pictures of angry nature wreaking havoc on the world's helpless creatures. Every once in a while, Leonardo DiCaprio comes onscreen to try and hammer home some point, though even his involvement isn't particularly interesting. In fact, during his segments I found myself zoning out altogether.

The so-so filmmaking aside, some of what a few of the interviewees had to say is thought-provoking. Much ado is made over the wonder and beauty of the human mind — though this is quickly tempered by the assertion that the mind has been both the key to our survival and the thing that has thrown us out of balance with the rest of nature. Basically, humans made this mess and now we need to clean it up. I did find this comment particularly intriguing: "Nature has no rights today. We see nature as property. Nature needs rights, too." Specifically, our generation is critical to designing a way for the human race to coexist with nature.

These interesting tidbits are truly hard-earned, however, since the viewer has to slog through a considerable amount of doomsday moaning about the state of the environment — and our guilty placement at the very center of this sorry state. Given the kind of audience this movie will likely attract, it certainly seems to be not just preaching to the choir, but sternly lecturing and shaming the choir, too. To find out what I mean by this,

Do Celebrity Causes Inspire You to Do Good?

BuzzSugar — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 09:30:00 -0700

This Friday, the Leonardo DiCaprio-narrated and -produced green documentary The 11th Hour opens in theaters. I'd bet the filmmakers, sisters Nadia Conners and Leila Connors Petersen, were pretty stoked to get a big name to endorse their film and their cause since this seems to be a good way to raise awareness. Angelina Jolie is, of course, a huge proponent of using her celebrity for good, as is Brad Pitt, most recently with his sustainable New Orleans houses. Pitt also has some impassioned Hollywood colleagues as George Clooney and Don Cheadle continue to help the ongoing crisis in Darfur. But does this sort of thing work to get more people involved? Do you find yourself inspired to do good deeds based on the causes that celebrities get behind? Source

Do Celebrity Causes Inspire You to Do Good?

Yes — Otherwise I wouldn't know about them, or how to get involved

Kinda; it at least gets me thinking

Not at all

Other (tell us below)

Leo Keeps The Party Going Way After The 11th Hour

PopSugar — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 16:01:37 -0700

After the premiere of the 11th hour Leo and his friends moved on to the after-party. Leo looked fabulously polished last night, but he claims that he doesn't waste too much time getting ready for red carpet events. He said, "How long does it take me? Usually 15 minutes, something like that,... And then it's about putting the suit on. I don't have a stylist -- usually it's my assistant who tells me to put this on and I go, 'Okay.'" He also said he won't leave home without his cell phone. Leo is always thinking about new ways to save the planet, so we're not surprised he saves water and energy by making a quick exit from his house every day.

More pics including Val Kilmer, Kate Bosworth and Tobey Maguire if you

The Trailer for Leo's 11th Hour

BuzzSugar — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 12:45:32 -0700

Soon after this year's Oscars, I heard tell of Leonardo DiCaprio's environmentally themed documentary, and now the movie has a trailer and a release date of August 17. Back then, DiCaprio was described as "using the medium that he knows best to explore the problem of global warming by making a documentary that is almost a film... the feature-length film even tries to proffer solutions for restoring the Earth's ecosystems."

Originally posted on the movie's MySpace page, the trailer for 11th Hour includes an introduction by Leo himself followed by footage from the movie that is clearly split into two parts:
Part 1: Foreboding doomsday images and forecasts of certain apocalypse if human beings continue down their current environmentally destructive path.
Part 2: Leo and friends more cheerfully appealing to "our generation" to be the hip saviors of the natural world — set to a driving rock song. The weight of the responsibility being placed squarely on us is cushioned by the promise of heroism: "This generation gets to completely change this world."

Heavy-handedness aside, this is a grave issue and if Leo can bring some attention to it then that's great. To see the trailer for Leo's documentary, the Inconvenient Truth for Generation Y,