Sebastian Falkes writing a new Jeeves and Wooster book came to my attention thanks for Andy Ihnatko, whose weekly omnibus program(me) The Ihnatko Almanac is a never-miss for me. Falkes has also authored his own stuff like
“Birdsong", and a best-selling James Bond book, “Devil May Care," has written “Jeeves and the Wedding Bells," to be released in the United States on Nov. 5
PG Wodehouse has incalculably huge shoes to fill. I don't envy this guy.
Superman Unbound is a pretty stellar adaptation of Geoff Johns' source story, adding and enhancing the narrative of essentially six issues of comic book into something feature length. I'm most thrilled to see a new Superman animated project that finds him punching robots.
Warner Archive's George Feltenstein and I talked about their month-old Warner Archive Instant (WAI) service, misreporting on the internet (ahem), and a ton of great rare and hard-to-find movies and TV shows from Warner Archive Collection (WAC).
The following movies and TV shows were discussed or mentioned during episode 35 of Screen Time, "Movies Are Not Screwdrivers". Almost every single one of these can be found on Warner Archive Instant, which US readers/listeners can try free for two weeks.
The embedded YouTube trailers are almost all user-uploaded versions and don't reflect the (exponentially higher) actual product. Where possible, I used Warner's own clips or trailers from YouTube. The individual WAI pages for each title feature much better trailers in most cases.
The theory I have going forward about traditional cable TV companies is that they can only compete on the side of picture quality compared to streaming "app channels" going forward.
At Cannes, Japan's NHK is showing off an 8K-shot comedy short titled Beauties À La Carte (press release PDF). It will be shown projected at 8K resolution, with 22.2 multichannel surround audio.
At the end of March, almost all of Criterion's Jean-Pierre Melville titles went OOP. Among them was the Jean-Paul Belmondo-starring Léon Morin, Priest, the Blu-ray of which Amazon has back in stock for $20 while they last. Grab it while you can. The movie is a rare opportunity to see Belmondo play reserved and pious.
I'm amazed that I found a good pair of shots that feature both Iron Man and Superman.
The following represent a small sampling of Iron Man and Superman comic reading recommendations for new/returning/lapsed fans of either character who have enjoyed (or will soon enjoy) either (but more probably both) of them in this summer's big ol' movies full of explosions.
Always check with your Friendly Local Comic Shop first (if possible) to see if they can get you trade paperbacks, Omnibus hardcovers, or even the original single issues. Support local businesses so that we don't have to live in a dystopian future.
The following were all recommended during episode 28 of The Comic Shack, "Men of Iron and Steel".
Disney didn't include a 2D Blu-ray in the 3D Blu-ray edition of Sam Raimi's Oz the Great and Powerful. People were upset. Disney said "pay us another $6 and we'll send you the 2D disc".
Huh.
Gaiam is a media company whose portfolio mostly included yoga, workout, and "sustainable lifestyle" content. Then, in 2012, they bought Vivendi Entertainment and they released a Blu-ray of the classic Max Fleischer Superman theatrical shorts. I bought it blind for around $30 last year, and only just tried watching it last night. Emphasis on tried.
The Max Fleischer Superman shorts are in the public domain, and have been on countless awful DVD and tape compilations for some time. In 2009, Warner Bros. put out a DVD sourced from the original master elements. That $10 DVD set handily outdoes the horrible $30 ripoff that is GAIAM's Blu-ray. All screengrab comparisons in this post are sourced from the discs in question, and represent how these look at full resolution and in motion.
Oh yeah...WB put all 17 shorts on their YouTube channel...in HD. I think this happened around the same time that GAIAM shat this disgusting excuse for a Blu-ray out the door. Good on Warner Bros., and shame on GAIAM. More further down.
GAIAM's 2012 Blu-ray. Note the watermark in the bottom right, which appears throughout every short.
Warner Bros.' 2009 DVD
Upstream Color has been one of my most anticipated movies of the year since its completion was announced. It was the best possible way to start SXSW 2013.
The new Blu-ray is beautiful. Even though it features none of the extras that home video collectors have come to expect and demand, the movie looks and sounds great, and that's the most important thing here. I'm not sure what sort of extras I'd even want for this movie. It either works for you and does something to your head, or it doesn't. The movie's narrative and themes rely entirely on the ebb and flow of your emotions, what happened to you that day, and the uncertainty of next week (or tomorrow). The greatest discomfort for some viewers will be its gentle nudging of you toward reconsidering the cycles we all engage in voluntarily and those we find ourselves drawn into with regard to love, money, security, and relative happiness. I'm convinced that the most terrifying thing for most people to consider isn't speaking in public, nor death, but rather, to contemplate breaking away from lives full of complacent causality.
The case is a very handsome, unobtrusive, and slim "digipack". Is that an extra?
•Disney is further shrinking the number of its Animated Classics not on Blu-ray by releasing Oliver and Company on 6 August and The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh on 27 August. No notable new extras were announced for either title. Here's hoping we finally get Black Cauldron in HD at some point.
•Warner Bros. has announced a Blu-ray double dip of 1993's The Fugitive, with no mention of whether this is a new transfer. It does include new extras (marked in bold) alongside the held-over original Blu-ray supplements:
•CBS is putting out its second "movie cut" of a Star Trek: TNG season-ending cliffhanger with 30 July's Blu-ray of Star Trek: TNG "Redemption", the end of season 4 and beginning of season 5. I guess The Best of Both Worlds did well for them.
•Scream Factory has announced an August timeframe for a Blu-ray release of Q: The Winged Serpent. Expect quality and extras to match the already-impressive slate from Shout!Factory's newest sub-label.
•Twilight Time is releasing a limited run of 3000 Blu-ray copies of Brian DePalma's Body Double on 13 August.
•Olive Films has announced four more June Blu-ray releases, including two from Jean-Luc Godard (How is it Going? and Keep Your Right Up), and Sam Fuller's Shark!, starring Burt Reynolds.
•Sony UK has announced a Blu-ray of From Here to Eternity for 7 October. It is a Region-All coded disc. The US disc has not been announced, but its release may coincide with the UK release. Then again, we could be left waiting for months like we have for Fox's Cleopatra, which they got last year, or Sony's own Lawrence of Arabia, which was Region-All, just like Eternity will be. Import without worry, as whatever extras it has (none announced as of now) are likely to mirror this one, just as with Lawrence.
•The BFI has announced additions to their July-August-September slate, with the most exciting titles to me being the 19 August release of The Adventures of Prince Achmed and Rosselini's Voyage to Italy (which they translate as "Journey"). Equally exciting is the 15 July Blu-ray debut of John Cassavetes' The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, complete with two cuts of the movie on one disc. All titles listed in the Blu-ray.com news piece are expected to be Region B-locked, but keep an eye on them as more information hits Amazon.co.uk.
Disc News Digest collects recent, relevant, and upcoming Blu-ray and DVD release dates in one place rather than fill your feed with a ton of individual stories for individual discs.
We'll see if this actually works. No one is used to spending money on YouTube, and it'll take very enticing content and drastically improved queue management for it to catch on at all.
Posted on the Facebook page for the Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation:
The Harryhausen family regret to announce the death of Ray Harryhausen, Visual Effects pioneer and stop-motion model animator. He was a multi-award winner which includes a special Oscar and BAFTA. Ray’s influence on today’s film makers was enormous, with luminaries; Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Peter Jackson, George Lucas, John Landis and the UK’s own Nick Park have cited Harryhausen as being the man whose work inspired their own creations.
Harryhausen’s fascination with animated models began when he first saw Willis O’Brien’s creations in KING KONG with his boyhood friend, the author Ray Bradbury in 1933, and he made his first foray into filmmaking in 1935 with home-movies that featured his youthful attempts at model animation. Over the period of the next 46 years, he made some of the genre's best known movies – MIGHTY JOE YOUNG (1949), IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA (1955), 20 MILLION MILES TO EARTH (1957), MYSTERIOUS ISLAND (1961), ONE MILLION YEARS B.C. (1966), THE VALLEY OF GWANGI (1969), three films based on the adventures of SINBAD and CLASH OF THE TITANS (1981). He is perhaps best remembered for his extraordinary animation of seven skeletons in JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS (1963) which took him three months to film.
The first indelible Harryhausen experience I had was seeing the skeleton fight from Jason and the Argonauts on cable as a kid. Harryhausen's work is a fundamental influence on many of my favorite films and filmmakers, and it's why the effects in movies like Jurassic Park look so good, and hold up today. The skeleton fight from Jason:
He had a long life, and thankfully saw an enormous swell of popularity that I think comes in large part from the rise of the internet. When I worked for the Alamo Drafthouse, I tried and failed to get both Harryhausen and Ray Bradbury together to present "the two Rays" with Fantastic Fest Lifetime Achievement Awards. Neither was well enough to travel, and now they're both gone. I wish that I had the ability, venue, and audience to throw a weekend-long, all-Harryhausen festival.
The only way I can crystalize how much Harryhausen's work meant to me is by saying that his version of movie magic helped my dreams grow, and my imagination follow suit.
Below, I've put together how to seek out his some of his best-known movies on disc and streaming, with trailers where I could find them. To my wife's chagrin, I may be spending the Amazon store credit I have on further filling out my Harryhausen shelf.
The Valley of Gwangi
The Valley of Gwangi
I'm particularly partial to this "cowboys and dinosaurs" movie that people don't know as well as the others listed above. If you've never seen it, you can sign up for the trial of Warner Archive Instant and watch it on your TV via Roku or in a browser window. I bought the DVD the moment it was available from them. I would kill for a Blu-ray, but those cost a ton of money to make. The DVD looks great, and the HD stream on WAI is gorgeous.
The 7th Voyage of Sinbad
It Came from Beneath the Sea
20 Million Miles to Earth
Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers
One Million Years B.C.
7th Voyage of Sinbad
All of these are part of a really solid box set that Sony put out in 2010. They're all piled high with extras, which are all quite thorough. The transfers are all great, too. I'm heading over to Fry's to see if they still have copies of the 2010 Sony box that include the figurine of Ymir.
Jason and the Argonauts
Jason and the Argonauts
Sony's Blu-ray looks as good as I think this movie can look (the above grab is from the disc), and it includes dual commentaries, one with Harryhausen himself plus historian Tony Dalton, and the other with Peter Jackson and effects guru Randy Cook. There are interviews and other solid featurettes included as well, and it's rare you find the Blu-ray for more than around $15.
Mysterious Island
Mysterious Island
Unfortunately, the only time this was on Blu-ray was by way of Twilight Time, whose releases are limited to 3000. You can find it second-hand for nearly $100 on the secondary market, but I would never recommend you go for that. You can buy it digitally from iTunes in HD for $15.
Clash of the Titans
Clash of the Titans
A grainy, but cleaned-up transfer is worth the sub-$10 price you generally find for the Blu-ray that WB put out just in advance of the awful remake coming out. An added bonus to ordering from Amazon: you can watch the movie for free via Amazon Instant Video once you've ordered the Blu-ray.
On the heels of my forwarding the idea that Nintendo should be making their own phones in this piece about Nintendo, The Japan Times reports that Big N is doing the opposite:
Nintendo Co. is trying to modify its game consoles so customers can use smartphone applications on them as it searches for a way to return to profitability, company sources said.
The game console and software maker has offered professional-use conversion software to application developers so they can produce smartphone games that can be played on Wii U, a struggling home video game console that helped widen the firm’s operating loss in fiscal 2012.
The way this reads implies that they are trying to create iOS and Android middleware that will make it easy for those developers to port existing games to Wii U. That doesn't change the fact that people will be more likely to carry those games around on their non-Nintendo smartphones.
Nintendo hopes smartphone software will help spur console sales, which will in turn lead to an increase in popular game titles for them, the sources said.
They will have to massively simplify their interface, and make the long-needed move of unifying the Virtual Console for both the Wii U and the 3DS, with Apple-like redownloading. The biggest problem facing Nintendo is that, like Toho Co., they are a 100-year-old company run by 100-year-old men. They will look at backward solutions like this instead of proper overhaul tactics. Even when things are broken, the solutions do not go far enough to properly correct their course. They still view themselves internally as a Japanese company that happens to have a "foreign" audience, instead of a global company based in Japan.
Nintendo will also focus on developing new software on its own, the sources said.
The entire contents of the story read like a controlled leak designed to shape this story as "Nintendo on the upswing". The software they should be focusing on is their own Android fork ("NintendOS"?) to go with their own phone hardware.
James Garner starting to "scrounge". This is one of his best roles in a career full of best roles.
This movie is readily available on DVD, but the now-OOP Special Edition carries an indispensible Roger Ebert commentary that is missing from the in-print version. I don't know why this commentary disappeared when the movie was re-issued, but I presume it may have had something to do with licensing terms with the Ebert company. It could have just been Fox Legal not wanting to do some additional paperwork, I don't know.
Knowing it isn't there makes the movie un-purchaseable for me. I bought the "old" version from a local secondhand DVD shop with money that could have gone toward a reasonably-priced new copy.
The Missing Disc looks at movies that are either not available on disc at all, or which exist only in A/V quality and packaging that film fans and scholars find lacking. Every movie should be on Blu-ray, but life isn't fair, and there isn't necessarily enough restoration and remastering money around. This column fights the most reasonable fights possible.
Since posting this update this morning, Greg Pak and Jonathan Coulton's Kickstarter take has leapt from $215k to over $230k. If they hit a quarter million dollars, they will also:
...make a CHILDREN'S BOOK based on Jonathan's awesome song "The Princess Who Saved Herself"! That's right, A WHOLE NEW BOOK, to be delivered digitally to every backer at the $15 level and above! And if we go far enough over the stretch goal, we'll consider the possibility of printing actual physical copies as well.
"The Princess Who Saved Herself" tells the story of a tough, tomboy princess who encounters a scary dragon and creepy witch -- and recruits them to play in her rock band. It's a beautiful, fun, funny song, and with your help, it's going to be a great kids' book. If we make the stretch goal, the whole "Code Monkey Save World" creative team will shift over to work on the children's book once the graphic novel is completed.
Click here to listen to the song: greg-pak.tumblr.com/post/48830950120/the-princess-who-saved-herself-by
Click over to the Kickstarter to see the gorgeous cover art and for more info. I interviewed Greg and Jonathan a couple of weeks ago on Giant Size (subscribe in iTunes). I'm finally pledging in myself tomorrow.
It's been known that a final 40-minute episode was in the works, bending around the conflicts of a cast who are all very, very busy now. Presumably, this special episode will air in the late summer or fall. I've missed this show, but with a track record like they ended up with, I'd rather it all be good than have a bunch of filler crammed in around the good stuff.
As a bonus, here's the awful US pilot/remake of the show, which is not awful on account of any of the actors:
Technically, this should bear an enormous "EXCLUSIVE!" tag in the headline, since Warner Archive's George Feltenstein just announced this publicly for the first time on the latest episode of Screen Time (which will post by Wednesday).
Just in time for the premiere of Steven Soderbergh's Michael Douglas-starring Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra on HBO, Warner Archive is putting 1955's Sincerely Yours on DVD for the first time. It was Liberace's one big starring turn, and it flopped big-time.
Here's a clip from the opening, from TCM's website:
Watch for it to pop on their store three weeks from today if you want the full Liberace Experience.
My guest for the most recent Giant Size (titled "Mahnke Mentoring", and soon to post in the feed) is artist Tom Nguyen, best known for his inking work for DC Comics.
I've listed a few collections that include what I consider great examples of his work. It's all Green Lantern, so consider this a mini-GL crash course. If you're getting into GL for the first time, you should start with Geoff Johns & Ivan Reis' Green Lantern: Secret Origin, which retells the origin of Hal Jordan and is designed to let you jump into the world of GL. As always, I recommend preferring and supporting your Friendly Local Comic Shop to Amazon or ComiXology if possible, but it's all a matter of choice. Choose where you shop wisely.
Original inked art of first-ever Muslim GL Simon Baz in Green Lantern.
A great story, linked by John Gruber last week. I now own this game, even though I may not have time to play it as obsessively as "Tycoon"-type games generally make you wish you could.