In the film industry, there’s failure, and then there’s straight-to-DVD failure.  The list of gems that have, for myriad reasons, failed to make it to the big screen can be counted on one hand, with Mike Judge’s instant classic Idiocracy standing out among the most recent bunch. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I have some good news: a new DVD release can be added to that minuscule list of gems.

Margaret, which had an extremely limited 2011 run in theaters, has had an utterly disastrous marketing campaign, coming far short of its first million in revenues (the ballpark budget was $14,000,000.  It’s made back about $50,000).  Despite its delays, multiple edits, and box office failure, the final cut of Margaret has emerged as a diamond in the rough.  In fact, despite never seeing the light of day, it would not be stretch to deem Margaret a contemporary masterpiece.

Riding the critical acclaim of his 2001 directorial debut You Can Count on Me, writer/director/playwright Kenneth Lonergan wrote a 360 page script for Margaret, laying down the framework for what would become a Sisyphean post-production process.   With a cast of well-known actors such as Anna Paquin, Matt Damon, Matthew Broderick, and his regular collaborator Mark Ruffalo, Lonergan had the tides of good fortune on his side.  Package the movie, prominently feature the big names on some billboards, and the movie would surely be solvent.  I mean, seriously, we’re talking about Matt Damon here.

Enter post-production.  There’s a fallout between Lonergan and his producers over the length of the final cut; Lonergan wants a three-hour edit, but Fox Searchlight opts for a two-and-a-half-hour cut that included the assistance of Martin Scorsese.

Four years later, Margaret had a feeble run in a tragically limited release.  Still, critics liked what they saw.  In fact, they liked it so much, an online petition spearheaded by critics plead Lonergan to release his intended cut.  Last week, the Lonergan cut was released on Blu-ray and DVD.  That’s five years after its intended release date.

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Unfortunately for our 16^th president, it seems Edward Everett rose from the dead to pen the meandering script of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. Yet judged by its base-heavy, slow-motion, blood-splattered trailer, Tim Burton’s newest movie looked just as epic as its title.

Stretch that minute and a half into an hour and a half, however, and the movie commits an error that Lincoln never would have. The president gave his Gettysburg Address in just two minutes, and director Timur Bekmambetov could take a lesson from him in brevity.

For what it delivers, Vampire Hunter is simply too long. Bekmambetov takes105 minutes to drag through a story that slashes historical accuracy as often as it does dead corpses—although neither of those two actions are unwelcome. If you expected Bekmambetov to stick to the historical record, I would refer you back to the movie’s title. And if you were looking for something other than silver-tipped shotgun/axe hybrids and fountains of scarlet blood, I would suggest someone other than Burton. But for the most part, that’s not what Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter presents.

Instead of an action-packed awesomefest of vampire slaying, the film takes us on Lincoln’s untold monomyth and bizarre coming-of-age story. Played by Benjamin Walker of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, a strapping young Abe witnesses the horrors of American vampires from his first years growing up in the log cabin.

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Judging a Wes Anderson movie after a single viewing is no easy task.  First of all, Anderson fills his movies with visual and dramatic subtleties.  This means after the third or fourth viewing (if you, like many Wes fans, can put up with 372 minutes of Rushmore), his films form an entirely new image in the audience’s mind.  As a Moonrise Kingdom virgin, then, I was apprehensive about judging the film upon my first sight of the closing credits.  That said, my mind eventually settled on a fact that I will not find myself disputing on my fifth Moonrise screening: it was weird, but weird in a good way.  Am I making any sense? No?  Let me explain.

The hero of Moonrise Kingdom is Sam, a precocious orphan on the run from his “Khaki Scout” troop.  Carrying nothing but his thick-framed glasses and a backpack full of camping equipment, this escapee sets out to meet his childhood sweetheart, Suzy, an ill-tempered loner who eagerly accepts Sam’s invitation to run away.  As the pair evades the scoutmaster (Ed Norton) and local law enforcement (Bruce Willis), they pick up a few life lessons.  Yes, that includes pondering about their nascent sexuality, and yes, it is as awkward as it sounds.    To round off the cast, Bill Murray and Frances McDormand play Suzy’s quarreling parents whose dwindling marriage serves as the bane of Suzy’s childhood.

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