With Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret finally hitting Blu-Ray/DVD shelves today, the wonderful PR team has unveiled a cool link that connects all the great actors attached to the film.
This 8 Degrees of Margaret chart reflects the many connections among the characters in the movie and the overlapping film projects they have worked on, and is a fun brain teaser for any film buff. Also, hover your mouse over the chart to see star pop-ups highlighting extra facts about those starring in Margaret.
Take a look after the jump and make sure to purchase Margaret today! You can click on our DVD store on the sidebar and order it directly.
Read more on 8 Degrees of Margaret connects its actors…
 I was twenty-one years old when I saw the three-and-a-half hour cut of Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret. The late and great Sydney Pollack was in attendance in the New York theater. I was writing for The Oscar Igloo then, probably within my first year of employment. I didn’t even understand the concept or potential of film criticism yet. I was in my senior year of college and was just hired as a teacher for a little catholic high school in the area. I still had the obsession of becoming an actor and didn’t realize that my passion was in critiquing. I loved film but I didn’t know how I could be “with” it for all eternity.
Read more on “Margaret” Revisited — Seven Years Later…
Stiller and Murphy and Alda and Broderick, oh my!
I have to admit that as I settled in to watch Brett Ratner’s “Tower Heist”, I had tempered my expectations way down. Brett Ratner has been a scattershot filmmaker at best, with an off-putting ego to match. The last two holiday seasons, Ben Stiller has sleepwalked his way through a third “Fockers” film in December 2010, and winced noticeably through the wheezing ca$h cow of a sequel in 2009′s “Night At The Museum: Battle Of The Smithsonian”. Eddie Murphy has not been on screen in more than two years (not counting his vocalizing of Donkey from the “Shrek” franchise), and his track record over the last several years, sans his 2006 Oscar-nominated turn in “Dreamgirls”, has been disposable and unremarkable. And there is just not much of a career anymore for Matthew Broderick, who has struggled to sustain relevancy, and stand apart for being anything more than Sarah Jessica Parker’s husband. “Tower Heist” presents with all the makings of a big budget catastrophe, but after a few minutes, you notice Ben Stiller has an extra zip in his step, the timing amongst the actors feels crisp and on point, and Ratner’s introductions to Alan Alda, Casey Affleck, and Michael Pena are well orchestrated and engaging.
Read more on Tower Heist (***)…
 A full 6 years after it was supposed to have come out, audiences finally are now able to see Kenneth Lonergan’s sophomore feature ‘Margaret’. For me, it’s almost a surreal experience to have sat down and watched it. Delayed by lawsuits and infighting as well as an inability of the filmmaker to find a cut he could live with in the editing room, some had speculated that it might never end up on screens, especially when Martin Scorsese’s editor Thelma Schoonmaker couldn’t even do the job (not to mention Sydney Pollack and Scott Rudin). The thing was, Lonergan had final cut and Fox Searchlight was unwilling to fire a director with that status, so it was a bit of a stalemate. People have gotten to see the flick during this time. Martin Scorsese declared the cut he saw to be a masterpiece, and a few years back our very own editor Clayton Davis got to see an early cut, checking in at over 3 hours. The polite way of phrasing it is that he didn’t care for it and disagreed with Scorsese’s assessment. In all honesty, he absolutely hated it. Well, now in 2011 I’ve seen a much different cut and I come to you all to say…I think I loved it. Granted, it’s clearly still a work in progress, but this is likely as close as writer/director Lonergan was ever going to get it to being done. There’s a sense of randomness to some of the scenes, suggesting the edit is one of many considered, and the pacing is inconsistent…hell, there’s even a boom mike in one shot, but if you focus in on the story and the film itself, it’s kind of beautiful. Maybe I’m reaching, but in many ways this is the big city version of ‘The Tree of Life’, just without all of the religion and writing issues that torpedoed Malick’s vision for me. In all the ways that particular film didn’t work for me, this one did. It’s full of ideas and even more packed with emotion, making for an intense viewing experience.
Read more on Margaret (***½)…
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