Mill Creek Entertainment announced this past week that July 18 will be the street date for a double-disc, four-film DVD promotion titled Director's Spotlight: Neil LaBute.
Playwright and first-time director Neil LaBute arrived on the scene in 1997 with the surprise Sundance Film Festival Filmmaker’s Trophy win for In the Company of Men (the film adaptation of his play), he was suddenly a very hot property.
Mill Creek Entertainment has gathered together the four films that followed this stunning breakout.
We begin with the 1998 film release of Your Friends & Neighbors, written and directed by LaBute, and featuring an “ensemble” cast of sex-starved and unhappy urban dwellers that includes Aaron Eckhart (as Chad in LaBute’s In the Company of Men), Catherine Keener, Nastassja Kinski, Jason Patric, Amy Brenneman and Ben Stiller.
This was followed by Nurse Betty in 2000, starring Renée Zellweger, Morgan Freeman, Chris Rock, Greg Kinnear and once again Aaron Eckhart. This is a surreal black comedy featuring Zellweger as a housewife — who has been traumatized and is now obsessed with a soap opera doctor (Greg Kinnear) — while being hunted by two hitmen (Freeman and Rock) who killed her husband (played by Eckhart).
Next in the series of films included in this collection is the 2002 release of the romantic drama, Possession, teaming Aaron Eckhart with Gwyneth Paltrow, as rival Victoria-era researchers and scholars who are fixated on the lives of poets Randolph Henry Ash (Jeremy Northam) and Christabel LaMotte (Jennifer Ehle). Parallel “love stories” (of sorts) are played out, switching back and forth between the modern day and the Victorian era.
Rounding out this impressive collection is the second adaptation of one of LaBute’s stage plays, The Shape of Things (2003), starring Gretchen Mol, Paul Rudd, Rachel Weisz and Fred Weller as college students who become romantically involved.
No comments:
Post a Comment