Electric Shadow

HD Guide: Now & Then 3 (Mystic River)


The picture and audio upgrade on Mystic River looks as good as one would expect from a film from the last ten years. All the 3-DVD special edition extras are retained with the exception of the score CD. The slimmer, sleeker container for the same content in higher definition is much preferred. I also do not miss the reams and reams of quotes and accolades.

Everything being on one disc is nice for convenience, and there aren't so many extras that this would adversely affect audio or video bitrate. Also not missed is the reference to the disc including "The Academy Award-winning film by Clint Eastwood". We got it, already.

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Archive Cross-section



top (l.-r.): Oscar Wilde's The Canterville Ghost as directed by Jules Dassin, Ed Asner in Christmastime TV movie The Gathering
bottom (l.-r.): The Boy With Green Hair, Cloris Leachman in Dying Room Only
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HD Guide: Now & Then 2 (Ran)


I'm withholding final judgment on StudioCanal/Lionsgate's Ran blu-grade until I've put it through the proper paces, but I've looked into it enough that I can do one of these comparing the raw content relative to Criterion's DVD edition. It was to have been blu-graded last year in the slot that became occupied by Kagemusha. The paper slipcase on the Blu-ray has the visual appearance of being textured paper, but is in fact your standard coated (non-gloss) job.

The back covers reveal the extras on each. The only item that appears on both releases is A.K., a 74-minute doc by Chris Marker. What I have yet to do is make sure none of the features overlap content or are simply the same thing by a different name, so this post may be edited after I've gone all the way through both. [Nothing else overlaps. 9 Feb, 9am]

The new edition adds three features not on the Criterion set. Art of the Samurai is an interview with a Japanese art-of-war expert. Akira Kurosawa: The Epic and the Intimate is another documentary about the director, billed above A.K. in the listing on the back cover. The Samurai delves into samurai art, costume, and weaponry. It also features sections of the film dubbed in French.

The Criterion extra that leaves the biggest hole for me is the 2005-vintage interview with star Tatsuya Nakadai, Kurosawa's latter-day Mifune. Also gone are the Stephen Prince commentary, Sidney Lumet "appreciation", and 35-minute video reconstruction of Kurosawa's sketches and paintings. The one thing that I suspect appears under a different name on the blu-grade is Akira Kurosawa: It Is Wonderful to Create, a 30-minute excerpt from the Toho Masterworks series.

The disparity in the included booklets and essays is miles apart. Time Out London's David Jenkins has put together a well-pondered and informative essay. Nothing against him, but...

...I sincerely feel the absence of an 8-page excerpt of an interview with Kurosawa, a full interview with composer Toru Takemitsu, and a bang-up essay from the Chicago Tribune's Michael Wilmington. Post-OOP scalpers will love me for saying this, but: Kurosawa completists and Ran fans should bite the bullet and find a copy of the Criterion edition whilst they can.
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Blandout


I wish I could say that Whiteout maintained some sort of suspense or at least my interest throughout, but it didn't at all. I didn't have the heart to watch the From Page to Screen featurette, even as an avowed fan of Greg Rucka. There's a certain novelty to the movie having been shot in tremendously adverse conditions, but that doesn't help make it exciting in the watching. The Coldest Thriller Ever and the aforementioned Page/Screen featurettes are exclusive to the Blu-ray, but the deleted scenes are on both editions. The Blu hit on 19 January and is currently $20 at Amazon.
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Surrogate Escapism

Piles of comparisons have already been made between Avatar and Surrogates, which both feature protagonists who climb into some sort of machine and transfer their consciousness into another body. Avatar uses biological hosts you control from a coffin in a trailer, whereas Surrogates uses androids you control from home.

The DVD & Blu-ray hit two weeks ago (26 Jan), and is destined to be a huge rental success. Bruce Willis and the action genre are catnip to the Blockbuster/Redbox-browsing crowd. Director Jonathan Mostow put together a reasonably serviceable graphic novel adaptation here that's certainly worth a rental. It's worth watching on a lazy afternoon, if only for the most hilarious beard and hair getup in Ving Rhames' career. The DVD only includes two extras, a director's commentary and a music video. The Blu-ray is the only way to see the deleted scenes and two featurettes (A More Perfect You: The Science of Surrogates, and Breaking the Frame: A Graphic Novel Comes to Life).
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Ode to Recklessness

I had a very fortunate opportunity to speak with Amelia (and Monsoon Wedding, Salaam Bombay!, & Mississippi Masala) director Mira Nair last week. We chatted for about fifteen minutes, and we touched on Amelia toward the beginning but moved to other topics she hadn't been asked about seventy times. This was in the interest of both getting into what she's working on next and to make this piece worth your precious time.

I feel that people went into Amelia with heavily loaded expectations as to what type of movie it was going to (or should) be and what tempo it would bop along at. The lovey-dovey art that took over the ad campaign didn't help this. This certainly isn't the first time a movie has been pitched to the masses as a sweeping "dip me and kiss me, you big strong man!" romance when it isn't. I much prefer the art that shows her looking out in the wild blue. That's what this movie is about. The following interview is culled from my copious notes since the audio file became corrupted and unusable.

I started off by introducing myself and telling Mira how fond of her films I've been since seeing Monsoon Wedding in college. I then asked her about what surprised her most in the research phase, since the subject seemed to play so naturally into her anthropological style of storytelling and sensibilities as a documentarian. She said, "After watching 16 hours of newsreels, and feeling this great sense of humility (which is not a typical American trait), I wanted to be part of telling this story. I wanted the audience to feel her curiosity...her passion and even recklessness. I wanted Amelia to be something different than what people expect from a biographical movie. I wanted people to feel like they were right there with her in the cockpit." I asked if there were any particular historical figures that she looked up to as a child. She said, "Not in particular, really. I read a lot of biographies and was very idealistic. I found myself constantly asking, 'Can art change the world?' and questioning what was expected." I then used the opportunity to ask about a film I've rarely seen her asked about in interviews, The Perez Family. The story is about three unrelated Cuban immigrants with the same last name who came over on the Mariel Boatlift. They register with immigration as a family to improve their chances of staying in the country. My father came over on the Boatlift, and I told her as much. I asked what drew her to that story, and whether it had to do with cultural parallels she felt between Indians and Latinos. She said, "You know, Cubans and Punjabis have a similar way of dealing with life in a tragicomic way. Both of our cultures have this appetite for living in spite of adversity, so yes, I felt very much at home." We only had a few minutes left, so I asked what she was in the process of putting together, and I got a timetable for both of her upcoming projects, "Well, I'm talking to you from New Delhi, where I have been preparing my next film. We will be shooting in New York, Lahore, and Chile. It's an adaptation of The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid. We're looking for a young man in his early twenties for the lead. It's an excellent book, and we will be shooting in September. Before that, we're taking Monsoon Wedding to Broadway in June to do a workshop, so both should be happening somewhat simultaneously in 2011." Since it seemed I'd bought myself another couple of minutes, I asked what it was like working with The Criterion Collection on their recent special edition of Monsoon Wedding (reviewed here, and now $23.99 at Amazon). She said, "They really are God's gift to cinema, aren't they? To be a part of the Collection is truly one of the greatest honors. And wasn't it just gorgeous, the packaging? It took three years to put it together in the way that I really wanted to, with the introductions and everything." I told her my favorite part, loving the short films as I do, was the retrospective interview she did with Naseeruddin Shah. She said, "Wasn't that wonderful? There were so many things he said that he had never told me about! That story about growing up, watching those movies, it was just remarkable." Our time was up, we said our goodbyes, and as a true indication of her person, she asked me to give her regards to my father. I can assure you that her generosity as an interview subject didn't compromise my view of the movie we were supposed to be talking about. Amelia the movie is as rare a bird as the person it's about. It's not some generic thrill-ride, but rather, a poetic elegy to a unique spirit. Plenty of people wanted it to go the way of adding some non-truth to spice up her story. That way, it would seem exciting to our easily-bored, impatient society. Prosecuting Nair for directing a movie about someone with an "unspicy" life by modern standards is simply ridiculous and smacks of opportunism. The movie is a meditation, not an "action-packed thrill ride". Amelia hit DVD & Blu-ray last week, with identical extras on both editions. They include ten deleted scenes, four featurettes (Making Amelia, The Power of Amelia Earhart, The Plane Behind the Legend, Re-Constructing the Planes of Amelia), and a pile of Movietone newsreels. Amazon has the DVD at $17.99 and the Blu-ray for $24.99.
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To Be At Rest

Lorna's Silence dispenses with the idea of loading you with exposition by picking up with our protagonist as she's going about her day. Lorna (Arta Dobroshi) is an Albanian emigre in Belgium who has agreed to a sham marriage to a junkie so that she can gain Belgian citizenship.

Lorna works hard all day in a laundry, juggling her illegal responsibilities as best she can. She's made a deal with a Russian gangster to become a naturalized Belgian, but she then has to leverage that to do him a favor back. Wherever we follow her, she is constantly in motion, fully engaged in getting the work in front of her done. She would love nothing more than to be free and clear of the dangerous arrangement she's made She has to sse things through so that she can finally be with her boyfriend Sokol (Alban Ukaj) and open the little restaurant they've dreamed of for so long. None of the commitments she has made are quite as straightforward as she expects, and her moral misgivings are only the beginning of her troubles. Lorna obsesses over control of her immediate situation Sony Pictures Classics released the Cannes 2008 award-winner on DVD at the beginning of the year (5 Jan). It's a rare example among the month's DVD releases of a movie more focused on real human relationships and consequences than one big sequence or controversial idea. None of the interactions feel as if in the service of achieving a story point instead of serving the motivations of the central characters.
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The Power of Passion and Soul

Jeffrey Levy-Hinte's Soul Power, one of my favorite films of last year, is now available on Blu-ray and DVD from Sony. It hit shelves last week (26 Jan), and closed out the month of January as one of the first true must-see disc releases of the year. As I said at SXSW last year, it's the undiscovered "killer B side to a doc that many already know and love, When We Were Kings."

Power hit a handful of screens last year, but this is how everyone will find it. Here's some more from my SXSW review: "Interspersed throughout the film are full single song performances by James Brown (the centerpiece of the festival), B.B. King, Bill Withers, Miriam Makemba, Celia Cruz & The Fania All-stars, and others. There's also a healthy amount of Ali spouting philosophy and observations that still ring true 35 years later." "The most significant find of the film, for me, is what I consider the most stirring Bill Withers performance put to film. Most people know him for other songs, but Levy-Hinte chose "Hope She'll Be Happy" out of the hour-long set Withers played. It's only a couple minutes long, but of all the sequences in the film, it left the greatest impression on me. The raw, cathartic wail in Withers' voice really drove home how completely free of emotion or talent most modern music is. Singers used to really pour themselves into it, not just twist the corner of their mouth because it'd look good on American Idol."

Bill Withers performing "Hope She'll Be Happy" at the Zaire '74 music festival
"The film plays fine on its own, but truly is best paired with a recent viewing of When We Were Kings. I watched Kings in the middle of the night before, and this is more than just cutting room, deleted scenes stuff. You're missing a significant part of the history of this event without Soul Power." I'm going to keep beating the drum on this one, so get it in your rental queue or order it up. The extras on both DVD & Blu are deleted scenes (including some more Muhammad Ali) and a feature commentary with director Levy-Hinte and the Zaire 74 festival producer, Stewart Levine. The Blu has the exclusive movieIQ thing with built-in playlist support, but I couldn't figure out how or why to make it work. The picture is grainy (welcome to 16mm in the early 70's), but as good as could be expected from the source. The audio is startlingly clear. Amazon is selling the Blu-ray for $22.99 and the DVD for $24.99.
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That's It

I didn't see This Is It theatrically. Watching it from my couch, I found it to be as surreal as watching him die on Twitter feeds and blogs all over again. Was I seeing drugged-up exhaustion, or the stresses of returning to live performance after years and years out of practice? Was he having trouble keeping conscious, or was he not used to the new gadgets and earpieces used?

As a kid, I loved Michael Jackson's music, partly because it was catchy, and partly because my mother hated it. The bizarre re-shaping of his face, the mystery of his children's genetic source code, and the continued molestation allegations don't change who he was before all of that. To me, Jackson was the person who opened a suburban kid's eyes to environmentalist activism and the realities of the third world. He introduced me to zombies with Thriller. Of course, his life after that horrifies and appalls me. There are tons of screwed up celebrities out there that inspired people at some point or another before their particular perversions went public. Jackson was the most famous of them all, and the fallout and mutation of his tainted legend was truly mythic in scope. I still find myself wondering whether the whole Jackson family saga actually happened or if I just saw it on TV. After watching This Is It and the extras, I'm absolutely shocked that the planned show didn't go on as staged and rehearsed with guest stars filling in for Jackson. Nothing was going to truly replace him, but the celebration of themes and artistry that Kenny Ortega and Jackson put together would still have worked. The 40-minute Staging the Return doc floored me with one thing in particular: the jumbo screen they had rigged was a 100'x30' LED display that was capable of producing enough light that for the first time, a stadium audience would be able to see polarized 3D in a live concert setting. The extras on the Blu-ray are more insightful than the movie, really. The movie is culled entirely from pre-death footage, whereas the extras are almost entirely from the post-death perspective. The "Thriller 3D" and "Smooth Criminal" vignettes are exclusive to the Blu-ray along with the Making "Smooth Criminal" featurette. The below extras can also be found on the DVD. The Gloved One [15:13] covers the full line of costumes that were designed (in some cases invented) for the tour. Particularly impressive was the LED-lit suit for "Billie Jean", which you have to see in motion to believe. Memories of Michael [16:19] is just a series of people who were involved with different stages of the tour relating anecdotes. It's lean, with no superfluous filler. Auditions: Searching for the World's Best Dancers [9:50] is roughly 1000 times more efficient at audition processes than over 20 hours of a reality TV series is in a given season. This Is It hit the street last week (26 Jan) from Sony. Amazon has the Blu for $23.99 and the DVD for $15.99.
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Bright Star

Jane Campion's film about the love affair of John Keats and Fanny Brawne is artfully done and outstandingly well-designed and paced for the plot and tone they're working with. Sony Pictures Classics' DVD (released 26 Jan) looks and sounds as good as DVD can. I only wish that there had been an accompanying Blu-ray, because this movie would have shown the format off to splendid effect.

Star got a Best Costuming nod the other morning, but it deserves mention for Cinematography as well. The movie is through-and-through a costume drama about the agony of existence before cell phones. It requires patience and concentration, two virtues with which the Notebook generation is less than acquainted. Abbie Cornish puts in a period-appropriate, authentic performance as Brawne, a woman ahead of her time. Ben Whishaw has little to do other than look ill and worried, but he does a solid enough job of the work. The extras include a single two- or three-minute deleted scene and three featurettes that total about 7 minutes. The featurettes are short interviews with Campion. The film speaks well enough for itself, but I would have loved to see a substantive featurette on the costume design process. This is destined for "that movie was pretty good, why hadn't I heard of it?" status.
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Boys Are Back, Last Days of Disney-max

The Boys Are Back, a tender single dad drama, hit DVD (but not Blu) last week (26 Jan) from Miramax. Everybody's Fine was also announced as DVD-only recently. I'd expect the remaining Miramax releases from Disney to go the cost-savings route and forego Blu-ray.

Boys Are Back features a lived-in, naturalistic performance from Clive Owen that not enough people have had a chance to see. Father and son grieve the loss of the boy's mother, and a little ways in, the dad's estranged first son, a teenager, pops up. Scott Hicks, who directed Shine, does an admirable job here moving the show along and not letting the inciting incident (a death) drag us into misery for just shy of two hours. In general sensibility and a few other respects, the movie reminds me of Dear Frankie, a Miramax release from a few years ago. It didn't get a huge theatrical push, nor has it gotten tons of attention on video thus far, but it's a good solid flick. The thing Boys Are Back has going for it that Frankie didn't is the proliferation of Netflix and the much-improved recommendation engine. The two included extras are a series of photos called The Boys Are Back: A Photographic Journey (with optional director's commentary) and a featurette entitled A Father and Two Sons, On Set.
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Forgiving Glee

The soundtrack is saturated with the artificial echo of auto-tuning. The lead guy is obviously not a long-time, practiced singer. Jane Lynch hasn't yet sung a note in the first thirteen episodes. There are tons of instances of contrived reasons for a high school teacher to show off his singing and dancing. The same guy is unnaturally dense and gullible, as if he came to this planet from Pleasantville (pre-color). Despite it all, Glee charms even the most cynical of people.

The (first half of the) first season being on DVD is not, as has been alleged, a shameless grab at money by Fox. It's an extremely wise move to provide it in a form that doesn't involve watching it online, which does not suit the styles of all viewers (myself included). Generally the most rabid social media-engaged folks out there are the ones who cry for blood, assuming that anything other than their style of media ingestion must be some plot to bleed them dry. The extras include a pile of featurettes, most of which will primarily appeal to mega-fans of the show. My favorite got into the genesis of the show and the casting process for the unknowns. The show's hiatus is a great opportunity to power through these first episodes and jump on board, and I have a feeling that plenty of people will.
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Jumbo Pack of Bite-Sized Refreshment

The mouthful I've used to title this piece is the best condensation of Paramount Digital Entertainment's Circle of Eight. The 83-minute feature released on DVD last week is a compilation/re-edit of the Mountain Dew-sponsored, 5-minute webisodes posted exclusively to MySpace last fall.

The whole thing is an ultra-short-attention span horror thriller that probably worked better in the bite-sized chunks it was originally served up in. I was a bit lost at first until I paused it and looked into the MySpace page, which is definitely a part of the experience. The Mountain Dew-sponsored bits have all been removed from the video itself, since they were built into the Flash video versions that were posted online. A young woman moves into a cursed/haunted building and starts seeing things. Shit gets real and then it gets out of control. It's nightmarish, hallucinatory, blah-blah-blah. DJ Qualls is the only immediately recognizable member of the cast. He plays the "creepy geek with a video camera". Extras include a behind-the-scenes, an on-location featurette, and a Day in the Life of a P.A. piece. The DVD edition does a good job of giving you a glance at how these tiny-portion, "webisodic" digital features come together. The whole feature isn't terribly interesting, but the nuts and bolts of how it was designed are reasonably diverting. Ah yes, Mark Mothersbaugh, of all people, did the music.
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New Belles at St. Trinian's

By all accounts, I should not have had such a comprehensively wonderful time with the reboot of the St. Trinian's franchise. The first film, based on a comic strip, came out in 1954, and starred Alastair Sim (the greatest yet Scrooge) in drag as the headmistress of a school for unruly girls who were as likely to be packing heat as they were to fail their classes at a "respectable" school. Sim also doubled the role of Miss Fritton's brother. The reboot features a who's who of British talent the likes of which you don't often see.

Rupert Everett takes over the role of Miss Fritton opposite Colin Firth as a conservative Minister of Education. When Barnaby Fritton (Everett) dumps his daughter Annabelle (Talulah Riley) at the looks-like-it-should-be-condemned school, we spend a little time watching her become one of the gang. Riley is probably best-remembered as the Bennett sister from Joe Wright's 2005 Pride & Prejudice who I nicknamed "Buzzkill" Bennett (Mary, I think). Her character goes on to learn that skanking it up is the secret to happiness.

Queen Rupert I
A fiendish plot is hatched to have the school closed, so the girls all come together to prevent this from happening by committing a few crimes. Other members of the cast include Gemma Arterton, Russell Brand as Flash Harry, Lily Cole (The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus) as a geek, Lena Headey, Lucy Punch (Timothy Dalton's much-younger girl-toy in Hot Fuzz), and Toby Jones (the "other" Truman Capote in 2005). Oh yes, Mischa Barton appears for a moment as well. A delightful cameo from Stephen Fry as himself was a very welcome surprise indeed. When St. Trinian's played the UK in 2008, it nearly doubled its 7 million pound budget back in box office receipts. The sequel opened in the UK late this past December in second place, right behind Avatar. I honestly think the movie would have done better in wide release in the States than plenty of "teen girl comedies" aimed at a similar audience. It's silly, rude, not-P.C. at all, and wholly offensive to evolved discourse. Sometimes a cheeseburger hits the spot, and sometimes you just want cheap, oily, and greasy fish & chips with plenty of vinegar. The DVD (no Blu-ray) extras include a behind-the-scenes bit (The Official School Diary) that's about ten minutes long, a few minutes of bloopers, a ton of deleted scenes, and the "St. Trinian's Chant" as performed by UK super-girl-group Girls Aloud. Yes, I'll probably watch this one again this year. Am I proud of that? No, not at all, but there it is.
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Free of FriedkinVision


Still one of my favorite car chases
I'm greatly relieved that MGM/Fox Home Video's Blu-ray of To Live and Die in L.A. is not displayed in FriedkinVision, with the colors acid-washed like the French Connection travesty of last year. The picture looks sharp and crisp, with no evidence of digital distortion, and I'll be damned if the dialogue has ever sounded this clear on a home video edition. It almost sounds like they re-ADR'd all the dialogue. Delayed from release last year, To Live and Die includes both a Blu-ray and DVD. The only really bothersome thing is the fact that all of the DVD SE extras are only on the DVD. The Blu-ray includes the feature and original trailer...and that's it. If you don't already have the DVD SE, $16 isn't bad. Otherwise, you're spending $16 for just the "Blugraded" visuals and audio.
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Perfectly, Seriously Timed

Had there been ten Actor and Supporting Actor nominees to match Best Picture this year, Michael Stuhlbarg, Fred Melamed, and Richard Kind would all be wearing tuxes in a month or so. The Blu-ray of A Serious Man hits next week (9 Feb), and it cleanly does what it needs to and gets it over with. The video and audio are crisp and clean, with no evidence of digital over-scrubbery.

What a couple.
The three extras included are Becoming Serious (a 17-minute making-of featurette), Creating 1967 (a 14-minute piece on the production design), and Hebrew & Yiddish for Goys (a 2-minute primer on terminology used throughout). I honestly can't think of what else I'd have wanted them to throw in, since the film speaks so well for itself. Becoming Serious covers all the ground the Coens were interested in covering, and leaves vague the things no one with any sense wants explained. They dedicate a few minutes to the "Looney Tunes short" that precedes the feature, and dub Sy Abelman (Melamed) "The Sex Guy" to hilarious effect for reasons that will make sense when you watch Becoming. Creating is not too much, not too little on how they acquired, found, and reworked everything from clothes to gadgets to cars and houses. H&Y for Goys only left one thing out that I recall: dybbuk; however, if you don't get what that is after watch the Finkel Short, you're probably not going to like the movie in the first place. Amazon's got it on Blu for $19.49 (50 cents more than DVD). I bet Universal is thrilled to have such a juicy free marketing tool (the Best Pic nom) announced 7 days out from this hitting the street.
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Out of Print Watch: Criterion's StudioCanal Titles

Criterion has announced that a pile of StudioCanal titles will go OOP in March, with rights going to Lionsgate. I knew the two weeks hence StudioCanal Collection Blu-rays (Ran, Contempt) were something of a precursor to this. Most notable among the disappearing are Grand Illusion (spine #1), Le corbeau, Pierrot Le Fou (second Blu to go!), Alphaville, Carlos Saura's Flamenco Trilogy and Peeping Tom. I'm not optimistic about Lionsgate handling these titles, but I'm open to being proven wrong. A full list with Amazon/Criterion prices (and links) follows after the jump.

 


"Have you heard the terrible news?"

 

I've listed links for both keeping in mind that Amazon often cuts their prices to match or beat competitors on top of the fact that one may run out of some of these before the other. I will update this post with pricing changes and updates over the coming weeks, so either bookmark this page or keep an eye on my Twitter feed.

My passion for home video and for Criterion specifically is born of the fact that this is the only way people will be introduced to classic movies in an era of ever-fewer repertory and retrospective screenings. Speaking of, there is a screening of Tati's Trafic in Chicago on the 13th & 15th of February.

I'm re-arranging my writing schedule for the day to get my Pierrot le fou review done a week ahead of when I'd planned. It should hit in the morning.

Eclipse
Carlos Saura's Flamenco Trilogy (Blood Wedding, Carmen, El Amor Brujo) [$37.49 Amazon/$30.96 Criterion Store]
This is the first Eclipse set to go out of print, and it's a blow to the Collection. Carmen is one of my favorite films: at once a dance film and a surreal romantic classic.

Criterion editions
Godard's Alphaville [$24.99 Amazon/$18.96 Criterion Store]
Spine Number 25 was Godard's surrealist science fiction classic, one of the least "conventional" films ever made.

Clouzot's Le corbeau [$26.99 Amazon/$18.96 Criterion Store]
This came out before Wages of Fear and caused the director no end of ill will at home in France from both the Vichy surrender monkeys and the liberal opposition. Once upon a time in Nazi-occupied France, it was unpopular to be anti-Gestapo.

Coup de torchon [$27.99 Amazon/$18.96 Criterion Store]
A bumbling police chief (Philippe Noiret) turned killer and his mistress (Isabelle Huppert) go on the run in French West Africa.

Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest [$35.99 Amazon/$26.96 Criterion Store]
Bresson's fourth film about a priest summarily rejected by his new parish. At least we didn't also lose Au hasard Balthasar, my favorite Bresson.

Carol Reed's The Fallen Idol [$23.99 Amazon/$18.96 Criterion Store]
The third collaboration between Carol Reed and writer Graham Greene (after The Third Man and Our Man in Havana). As one of the post-rebranding titles, I was really hoping to see a Blu-ray of this eventually. Alas and alack.

Clement's Forbidden Games [$26.99 Amazon/$18.96 Criterion Store]
Winner of a special Foreign Language Academy Award, this Rene Clement "loss of innocence" film from 1952 features a girl whose family and dog are killed by the Nazis. She is taken in by the family of a young boy. They team up to found their own little animal graveyard where they start burying all sorts of animals they find. They court trouble by stealing crosses...

Renoir's Grand Illusion [$32.49 Amazon/$26.96 Criterion Store]
The biggest hole in the Collection will now be the first spine number. If a film studies professor never showed this to you in an introduction to film course, they are a failure to academia. Erich von Stroheim's be-gloved supporting performance as von Rauffenstein is still brilliant. It kinda breaks my heart that Criterion may never do a deluxe re-do of this one for Blu-ray.

Cocteau's Orphic Trilogy (The Blood of a Poet, Orpheus, Testament of Orpheus) [$62.49 Amazon/$58.96 Criterion Store]
Cocteau's subversive trilogy spread across 29 years (1930, 1949, 1959) includes his final film.

Powell/Pressburger's Peeping Tom [$32.49 Amazon/$26.96 Criterion Store]
Another heartbreaker, this film was reviled at the time of release but is now considered an all-time great. It is still shamelessly ripped off by student (and professional) filmmakers to this day.

Godard's Pierrot le fou (Blu-ray) [$25.99 Amazon/$26.96 Criterion Store]
Godard's Pierrot le fou (DVD) [$35.49 Amazon/$26.96 Criterion Store]
Only a few weeks ago, I ordered this one myself, and it's crushing that it is going out of print less than a year after release. This is the second Criterion Blu-ray to go out of print (after The Third Man). It's one of the best uses of Jean-Paul Belmondo, and one of the last collaborations between Anna Karina and her ex-husband, Jean-Luc Godard. I was going to review this next week, but now's the time. The Blu-ray is the way to go, even if you don't have the equipment. Get it now or (possibly) never.

Port of Shadows [$27.49 Amazon/$23.96 Criterion Store]
A favorite of Carl Theodor Dreyer, it makes a brief appearance in Atonement.

Clouzot's Quai des Orfevres [$26.99 Amazon/$23.96 Criterion Store]
This untranslated title refers to a famous Paris police precinct. Clouzot's followup to Le corbeau is a jealous husband/actress wife story that shouldn't be ignored due to a perplexing-to-Americans title.

Powell/Pressburger's The Small Back Room [$35.99 Amazon/$26.96 Criterion Store]
The followup Powell/Pressburger project to The Red Shoes was not only done in black & white, but much more an individual character study. If it helps encourage anyone to seek it out, I'd call it something of a spiritual precursor to The Hurt Locker (the main character is a bomb disposal expert). This is one of the best WWII movies you've probably never seen.

Powell/Pressburger's The Tales of Hoffmann [$29.99 Amazon/$26.96 Criterion Store]
I have two words for you: Powell/Pressburger. I have four more words for you: Martin Scorsese commentary track. Click the link, it describes it better than I can here.

Tati's Trafic [$35.49 Amazon/$26.96 Criterion Store]
It's difficult to put into words how much I wanted there to be a Blu-ray edition of this, the last Monsieur Hulot movie, so I won't try. The next thing that comes to mind is, "does StudioCanal also own M. Hulot's Holiday and Mon oncle?" Anyone budgeting for this Get It While It Lasts Sale should have this on their acquisition list. There's a 2-hour 1989 doc about Hulot on here. That should be enough for Tati aficionados.

Le trou [$26.99 Amazon/$18.96 Criterion Store]
"The Hole" is the true story of five inmates tunneling to freedom. The director died months after finishing the movie, and one of the real-life participants acted in the movie. Most of the cast are non-actors.

Fellini's The White Sheik [$29.49 Amazon/$18.96 Criterion Store]
A slapstick comedy was Fellini's solo directorial debut. Nino Rota did the score, and his wife Giulietta Masina acts.

Essential Art House editions
The Essential Art House collection are all movie-only, and I'm leaving out links for now in the interest of getting this posted. Criterion started this series so that people interested in just the movie could get their hands on it. Titles denoted with a (*) are also OOP in their Criterion editions.

Forbidden Games* [$17.99 Amazon/$10.96 Criterion Store]

Gervaise [$17.49 Amazon/$10.96 Criterion Store]

Grand Illusion* [$17.99 Amazon/$10.96 Criterion Store]

Le jour se leve [$19.49 Amazon/$10.96 Criterion Store]

Last Holiday [Amazon/$10.96 Criterion Store]

Mayerling [$17.99 Amazon/$10.96 Criterion Store]

The Tales of Hoffmann* [$17.99 Amazon/$10.96 Criterion Store]

Variety Lights [$17.99 Amazon/$10.96 Criterion Store]
The Criterion edition is already OOP, but Amazon will still let you order the Criterion version for $26.99 even though it shows as "Temporarily Out of Stock".

The HD Guide's Out of Print Watch is designed to give a head's up to collectors and fans of movies that are going out of print before they're hard to find, over-priced, or both.

Back to the Edge

I spent nearly three hours of my weekend watching the first half of the 1986 BBC miniseries original Edge of Darkness starring Bob Peck. Peck is best-remembered as Muldoon from Jurassic Park ("Clever girl."), but this was his breakout role. I'll wait to rent the new Mel Gibson feature do-over, even though director Martin Campbell did both. There's a quiet, underplayed simmer to the original that I don't see the Age of Information improving by adding cell phones and the internet to the mix.

I mention that Peck is "remembered" because he died of cancer far before his time in 1999. The breed of English stage actors he shared marrow with are all but extinct. They moved from the theatre world to film, but not out of hubris. Peck was of the same style as Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, and Jeremy Irons, all board-treaders who went to TV who then went to film. They're past endangered and are all but extinct in terms of newcomers. Flanking Peck are very young, fresh-faced versions of the inimitable Joe Don Baker and Ian McNeice along with Joanne Whalley (as the slain daughter) and Zoe Wanamaker. BBC/Warner Home Video released the original series on DVD late last year, and I'd rather pay the $23.99 Amazon is asking before I'd have spent roughly the same on tickets and dinner out last weekend. What makes this worth purchasing is that the extras are uncommonly good. Vintage interviews, featurettes, and TV chat show clips on Disc 1 manage to not spoil things that happen in the second half on Disc 2 because they actually aired during the night of the third episode or just after. I was also glad to see the return of the now rarely-found Isolated Score track across the whole series. The alternate ending to the final episode is interesting as well. When the Mel of Darkness remake hits video, I'll be interested to see how the two compare. For now, I'll hang with Bob Peck.
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