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Buzz's Gift Guide: Box Set Bonanza!

BuzzSugar — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 07:30:21 -0800

Welcome back to my Buzz Gift Guide series for all the entertainment lovers in your life. Yesterday I came up with some ideas for your coworkers, and today, I'm focusing on some splurge gifts for someone special: DVD box sets. These sets, whether a whole TV series or a collection of films, are pricier than the average gift, so they're definitely meant for that superfan who you know will cherish these DVDs forever.

I know many a Sopranos fan that would covet this giant box set that includes the complete series of the HBO show plus tons of special features - including creator David Chase and the cast talking about one of the alternate endings.

Fans of Freaks and Geeks will forever love anyone who gifts them this special "Yearbook Edition" box set. Also, the acclaimed series The Wire is available in its entirety now just in time for the holidays.

Finally, I personally would kill for this collection of films directed by Pedro Almodovar with eight movies including Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, All About My Mother, Talk to Her, The Flower of My Secret, and Bad Education.

Viva Pedro - The Almodovar Collection ($105.99)	The Sopranos - The Complete Series ($199.49)
The Wire: The Complete Series ($134.99)	Freaks & Geeks: Yearbook Edition ($129.99)	Amazon.com: Deadwood ($104.99)

Check out HolidaySugar for all of our holiday coverage and gift guides.

What to Netflix: New DVD Tuesday

BuzzSugar — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 08:30:04 -0800

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 my picks below, you can now pick up Fred Claus starring Vince Vaughn and Paul Giamatti.

Hancock
Will Smith's Summer blockbuster has a clever premise at the heart of it: If we genuinely look at what life might be like for a modern-day superhero - especially one with rage issues - what challenges might this guy face? Smith manages to balance the humor of this role along with the badass superhero elements and the result is an all-around entertaining performance. I also think Jason Bateman who plays Smith's PR guy is a real highlight of the movie and reason enough to add it to your queue.

Special features include an unrated version of the movie with footage not seen in theaters, a stunts featurette, and behind-the-scenes footage.

Two more television gems up next, so read more.

Beverly Hills, 90210: Season 6
The farther we get into the new 90210, the more anxious I am to watch the original Beverly Hills, 90210 when I get the chance. I know for some purists the later seasons of the show got a little too nuts but I think the post-Brenda era (which includes Tiffani-Amber Thiessen as evil vixen Valerie Malone) is totally awesome in its own way.

Season six includes Donna's abusive relationship with that guy Ray, Brandon gets addicted to gambling again, and I'm pretty sure this is the season Kelly dabbles in coke. What's not to love?

Freaks & Geeks: Complete Series
Technically I'm not positive this special version of Freaks and Geeks is available on Netflix but I wanted to tell you about it anyway. For those of you who still yearn for more tidbits of your favorite McKinley High stoners, tough kids, bad girls, brains and dorks, this yearbook special edition of the complete series will probably do the trick.

In addition to all the original episodes, commentaries and special features of the regular complete series set, this special version comes with two bonus discs housed in a 40-page yearbook that includes exclusive photos, memorabilia and essays. These new features specifically include original cast auditions, a table read, Museum of Television & Radio Panel, deleted scenes and more.

90210 + Freaks and Geeks: A Match Made in Heaven?

BuzzSugar — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 08:30:00 -0700

At first glance, Freaks and Geeks and 90210 wouldn't appear to have a lot in common. One was a hyper-realistic drama that told quiet stories about high school life and was canceled after a handful of episodes. The other was a massively popular soap that looked at teenage years through a glamorous lens.

But Freaks and this Fall's bright, shiny reboot of 90210 share one big thing: their writers. Gabe Sachs and Jeff Judah made a splash on Freaks and created the little-seen (but much loved, at least by me) Life as We Know It for ABC. Now, at the helm of one of this Fall's most highly anticipated shows, the two are looking to reinvent the teen show yet again.

At the TCA press tour, Sachs and Judah talked about what compelled them to take on the project and how they'll try to keep this round of Beverly Hills stories grounded in reality. Can they pull it off? I'm now more excited than ever to see them try. To see what they had to say about how they plan to meld their style with the CW's fast-paced glam, just read more.

How do two Freaks and Geeks guys end up at the helm of a majorly promoted show that, if it does well, could possibly get credit for saving an entire network? Did they have to change their style to fit in? "Somebody had to adapt," quipped Rob Estes, who plays Beverly Hills High principal Harry Wilson. "But I don't think it was them."

Nobody was more concerned about the adjustment than Sachs and Judah themselves. Sachs (pictured at right) said the two of them spent a long time talking about whether they could pull off the project, but in the end, they just wanted to go for it. "Our writing's not going to change," Sachs said. "This is how we write, and this is how we create stories."

Sure, some of the characters might seem over-the-top at first, but Sachs and Judah, who also previously worked on What About Brian, want us to learn why, by meeting their parents and learning about their values. "We're trying to put as much - we've said it a thousand times - reality into it [as possible]," Sachs said.

And we can expect some serious awkwardness mixed in with all the glitz. "We shot something the other day - it's just a tiny, one-second line, but it's one of many Freaks and Geeks lines that we're trying to put in," Judah said. "There are moments in this show that would have fit in Freaks and Geeks."

Do you think it can work? Are you excited to see where two guys from the Judd Apatow universe can take the 90210 franchise? Or does that just seem like an unholy union?

Photos courtesy of The CW and Source

Freaks and Geeks Speak: Part Three

BuzzSugar — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 15:30:23 -0800

Over the weekend, a group of Freaks and Geeks alumni - cast members Linda Cardellini, John Francis Daley, Samm Levine, Martin Starr, Busy Philipps, Dave (Gruber) Allen, and Steve Bannos and creator Paul Feig - took the stage at San Francisco's Sketchfest to share their memories of the great, underappreciated show. I was there, and this week, I'm sharing some of their best stories with you. I've already told you how the series got started and passed on some tales from the set. In today's final installment, I have trivia from the show, plus news on everyone's new projects. Here goes:

Linda Cardellini still has the green Army jacket that was practically a part of her body when she played Lindsay. "I thought about bringing it," she told the audience, "but I thought I might look like a gigantic loser."
Sarah Hagan, who played the conservative Millie, was apparently a shocking amount like her character. Cardellini recalled that in one scene, Millie was supposed to ask Lindsay if Kim "fornicates," but Hagan (who, Cardellini recalled, hadn't talked much about sex at that time) accidentally asked if she "fornicated it." That take ended up in the show.
Busy Philipps only did the show because she ran into Cardellini in the airport in LA shortly before the show was supposed to start. Philipps' agent had been against her taking the role of Kim Kelly because it was initially only a guest spot for the pilot, but Cardellini - whom she'd known in college - insisted that working together would be fun.
Samm Levine and Martin Starr were both terrible about learning their lines and would typically just cram the morning of the shoot.
Linda mastered the art of never eating food on screen; in the dinner scenes, she mostly just pushes her food around and gestures with it, which Paul Feig pointed out is "very teenage girl." She said it was all because of an early job where she didn't realize that if she ate food in one take, she'd need to eat in every take; that experience turned her off lasagna for 10 years. Philipps said it took a Freaks and Geeks scene where she ate more than a dozen donuts over the course of shooting for her to learn that lesson.

To hear my favorite story from the whole discussion and see where you can find your favorite Freaks and Geeks now, just read more.

Here's my favorite story from the whole panel: Cardellini said she was once stressing out about how to play a family dinner scene, thinking all sorts of deep thoughts about acting. At one point she looked up and saw John Francis Daley just shoveling meatballs into his mouth. With his mouth full, he looked up and exclaimed, "This is the greatest job ever! All you have to do is, like, act!" Cardellini says she still thinks about that when she's stuck on how to play a scene.
Speaking of Cardellini, she's in her fifth season of playing Samantha Taggart on ER.
Samm Levine recently appeared in Sydney White with Amanda Bynes.
Feig is directing the pilot of Kath and Kim for NBC and is working on another book. He's also had a couple of brief cameos in Judd Apatow movies, including Knocked Up and Walk Hard.
Daley recently sold a screenplay that Daniel Clowes is rewriting and Terry Zwigoff of Ghost World is directing. He also started appearing regularly on Bones last fall.
Philipps is pregnant!
As for those who weren't at the panel, James Franco is in production for the Harvey Milk biopic Milk, Seth Rogen is working on Zack and Miri Make a Porno with Kevin Smith, Jason Segel stars in How I Met Your Mother and Forgetting Sarah Marshall - and, the panelists joked, Judd Apatow is counting his millions.

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Freaks and Geeks Speak: Part Two

BuzzSugar — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 09:30:40 -0800

Over the weekend, a group of Freaks and Geeks alumni - cast members Linda Cardellini, John Francis Daley, Samm Levine, Martin Starr, Busy Philipps, Dave (Gruber) Allen, and Steve Bannos and creator Paul Feig - took the stage at San Francisco's Sketchfest to share their memories of the great, underappreciated show. I was there, and this week, I'm sharing some of their best stories with you. Yesterday, I told you how the series got started; today, I have tales of what it was like on set:

While it seems like the whole cast genuinely likes each other now, that wasn't always the case. "It was really too much like high school sometimes," Cardellini said, with cliques and alliances forming and disbanding.
Daley said at the time of the show, he was "14 years old and alone," and the big kids wouldn't let him hang out with them. But, he acknowledged, it probably would have been weird to have a young teenager hanging out with actors who were out of high school.
Some of the nastiest disputes on the set came between Philipps and James Franco. At the time, Philipps said, they could barely even speak to each other: "It was legendary how much we hated each other."

To hear about the biggest dispute Philipps and Franco ever had, and to see where the characters might have gone had there been a season two, just read more.

Philipps said the worst things ever got with Franco was the day the two shot a scene from "We've Got Spirit." Her character was supposed to say something to Franco's and then whack him lightly on the shoulder. He responded by flinging her hand away, screaming "Don't you f*cking touch me!" and throwing her to the ground. Feig said he still has the copy of the film from that scene, which ended with Philipps lying on her back, alternately crying and laughing out of embarrassment, with her hands over her face: "It was like, flat on my back, wind knocked out of me assault by James Franco!" (She then pointed out that Franco recently sent her a very nice wedding present.)
Had the show continued into a second season, one potential storyline for Kim Kelly was that she would try out for the school musical, get a part, and end up getting really into high school theater. She might have also finally gotten her picture taken for the opening credits, though Philipps noted that she thought having "and Busy Philipps as Kim Kelly" in the credits instead was kind of cool.
Samm Levine said he would have pushed for Neal to lose his virginity and then lord it over Sam and Bill. Feig quickly noted that even if the show had gone for eight seasons, Neal never would have lost his virginity.
Sam Weir would have started drifting more toward the popular crowd, Daley said, and "then having that mental conflict of, 'Should I stay with my friends?'"
Martin Starr's Bill might have become a jock, especially if his mom had stayed with the gym teacher.
Somewhere down the line, Mr. Rosso might have started his own Interlochen-style school with "a lot of poetry readings, a lot of back rubbing - wink! - where everybody could learn at their own speed," Allen said.
Cardellini wouldn't reveal much about her hopes for Lindsay but said the joke on the set was always "that Lindsay comes back from the Dead pregnant."

Tomorrow: Freaks and Geeks trivia, plus what everyone involved is doing now.

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Freaks and Geeks Speak: Part One

BuzzSugar — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 14:31:04 -0800

Over the weekend, a group of Freaks and Geeks alumni - cast members Linda Cardellini, John Francis Daley, Samm Levine, Martin Starr, Busy Philipps, Dave (Gruber) Allen, and Steve Bannos and creator Paul Feig - took the stage at San Francisco's Sketchfest to share their memories of the great, underappreciated show. I was there, and over the next few days, I'm going to share some of their best stories with you. Let's get started:

Paul Feig said that when the series began, all of the writers filled out questionnaires about their own best, worst, and most memorable high school experiences. When someone came up with something truly awful, Feig said, his reaction was: "Oh, that's a terrible story! We'll use that on the show!"
Cardellini, who played geek-turned-freak Lindsay Weir, said sometimes she'd think the stories were so awful or out there, they had to be made up. "Then you would look at Paul, and you'd see the earnest look on his face and the sadness in his eyes, and you'd realize that most of this happened to Paul."
Feig said he set the show in 1980s Michigan largely because that's what he knew best, but he also had a few specific reasons for that setting: He wanted it to be set in pre-AIDS times so that people were afraid of having sex because they were afraid of sex itself; he wanted his show to be pre-cell phone because technology restricts interpersonal interactions; and he wanted to show Midwestern life because it's so common and real.

More, including Feig's inspiration for Lindsay, if you read more

Feig said most of the characters were based on people he knew, but Lindsay was a composite character based largely on his own journey. He had been raised in a religious household, and at the time he created Freaks and Geeks, he was turning toward atheism. "Any crisis I was going through at the moment," he said, "I put onto Lindsay."
Feig believes that if the show had premiered a couple of years later, it might still be on the air. It came on right in the middle of game show mania, and it would get pummeled by Who Wants to be a Millionaire and was replaced by NBC's attempt to revive 21. It was one of the lowest-rated shows on NBC at the time, but it was still getting 7 million viewers a week, more than some current network shows.
Some members of the cast said they realized what an unusual experience it was to work on Freaks and Geeks. John Francis Daley, on the other hand, said he thought it was the norm to do shows that good, ". . . and then I did The Geena Davis Show." Busy Philipps said she didn't realize how tough things were on normal network TV shows until she appeared on Dawson's Creek, where she was told that it didn't matter if she screwed up because they'd just cut to Katie Holmes anyway.
Feig said making the show was so touch-and-go that they approached each episode as a stand-alone independent film. The final episode that aired, "Discos and Dragons," was actually shot out of sequence, so it would always be there to close the series.

Tomorrow: cliques on the set, hopes for a second season, and a fantastic James Franco story, courtesy of Busy Philipps.

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Buzz Gift Guide: For Nerds, With Love

BuzzSugar — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 15:33:56 -0800

For today's holiday gift guide, here are some suggestions for some of your friends who are perhaps a little goofier than others. In this case, "nerd" is an affectionate term, not just a four-letter word.

Few other movies can provide such feelings of triumph as 1994's Revenge of the Nerds. With this gift, you can now go above and beyond the normal DVD version with The Atomic Wedgie Collection.

Judd Apatow's TV series Freaks and Geeks was such a comforting show because all the weird teens of the world could feel understood - whether they were "freaks" or "geeks." Freaks and Geeks - The Complete Series collects all 18 episodes of this show that ended far too soon.

I must admit, I can be a huge nerd sometimes, and I love me a good pun. Thus, I get a huge kick out of these punny aprons at WearableVegetables, like this one that reads "Lord of the Onion Rings." There are some other doozies there that just might crack up your nerdiest of buddies, like "Desperate Housechives," "Silence of the Yams," and "Who's Afraid of Ginger Root?" These can also be applied to tote bags, t-shirts, oven mitts and more.

What to Netflix: "Freaks and Geeks"

BuzzSugar — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 04:29:00 -0700

In his IMDB bio, Judd Apatow is quoted as saying, "I think that everything I do tends to root for the underdog. I always felt as a kid that I was under appreciated, invisible or weird, but I've always secretly thought people would one day appreciate what is different about me. I'm always putting that message out there. Eventually, the nerds and the geeks will have their day."

Well, if Judd Apatow, writer/director of today's new comedy Knocked Up was unappreciated as a geeky kid, then he is now the epitome of the underdog success story.

Years before Knocked Up was even a glimmer in Apatow's eye, though, he created "Freaks and Geeks," the short-lived TV series made to comfort and entertain high school underdogs everywhere.
The show follows siblings Lindsay and Sam Weir, both of whom are on the outskirts of cool at their Michigan high school circa 1980. The writing is smart and funny in the way we've now come to expect of Judd Apatow, and the cast (which includes James Franco and Seth Rogen, among other funny and personable actors) is superb. Even if you were neither freak nor geek in high school, there is so much to love about this show.

Movie Preview: The TV Set

BuzzSugar — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 05:25:21 -0700

While the networks prep their Fall pilots, the rest of us wonder how so many laughably bad shows get made, even as truly great series disappear forever. Perhaps we should ask writer and director Jake Kasdan, whose new movie, The TV Set, hits theaters on Friday, April 6. Kasdan was one of the creative forces behind the short-lived but much-beloved "Freaks and Geeks," so it's fitting that he's now making a movie about the making of a TV pilot.

The TV Set - tagline: "a place where dreams are canceled" - follows scribe Mike Klein (a scruffy David Duchovny) as he attempts to rescue his show, "The Wexler Chronicles," from death by committee. I'm glad to see Duchovny back on the big screen, and the supporting cast also looks promising, including Sigourney Weaver as the persuasive network executive, Willie Garson ("Sex and the City"), and Justin Bateman.

The premise sounds great, and the trailer makes me laugh, but for some reason, The TV Set's 89-minute runtime makes me nervous. I'm still putting it on my "to see" list, though, so watch the trailer and tell me me what you think when you read more

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