We're getting Kurosawa's masterpiece of POV Blu-graded, a Pasolini box set in time for the holidays, one of Godard's most incendiary works, Cimino's controversial epic, and yet another great Eclipse set featuring weird Japanese movies. In short: yet another wallet-pain-inducing month.

6 November 2012

#138
Rashomon (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1950)
Blu-ray Upgrade

Long-requested by Kurosawa fans, this is one of the most iconic "it's [blank]-like" movies that is used to describe an entire style of narrative.

First off, we get the handsome painted poster art for the new cover. It has been around for a few years, and I'm glad it replaces the old art, which I never found too appealing. The Blu-ray adds a new 68-minute featurette (A Testimony as an Image, with cast/crew interviews), the rerelease trailer, and an archival audio interview with Takashi Shimura, who plays The Woodcutter. They've also done a fresh pass on translating the subtitles. The essays found on the disc itself have been moved to the paper booklet. Nothing has been deleted.

Supplemental features (additions in bold):

New digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
Audio commentary by Japanese-film historian Donald Richie
Video introduction by director Robert Altman
Excerpts from The World of Kazuo Miyagawa, a documentary on Rashomon’s cinematographer
A Testimony as an Image, a sixty-eight-minute documentary featuring interviews with cast and crew
Archival audio interview with actor Takashi Shimura
Original and rerelease trailers
New English subtitle translation
PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by film historian Stephen Prince; an excerpt from director Akira Kurosawa’s Something Like an Autobiography; and reprints of Rashomon’s two source stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, “Rashomon” and “In a Grove”

13 November 2012

#631
Trilogy of Life (dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini)
The Decameron (#632, 1971)
The Canterbury Tales (#633, 1972)
Arabian Nights (#634, 1974)
Blu-ray and DVD

If you only know Pasolini as "the guy who made that really gross movie Saló", you are doing yourself a disservice. These three films are indeed full of sexual and scatological themes as is the controversial 1976 film. Ennio Morricone scored all three, and as a trilogy, they eviscerate modern capitalism and what the filmmaker viewed as the unnecessary complication introduced to life by the relentless quest toward "progress". This boxed set appears to offer the same kind of exhaustive coverage found in the recent David Lean Directs Noel Coward set and The Three Colors Trilogy.

Supplemental features:

New high-definition digital restorations of all three films, with uncompressed monaural soundtracks on the Blu-ray editions
New visual essays by film scholars Patrick Rumble and Tony Rayns on The Decameron andArabian Nights, respectively
New interviews with art director Dante Ferretti and composer Ennio Morricone about their work with Pasolini, and with film scholar Sam Rohdie on The Canterbury Tales
The Lost Body of Alibech (2005), a forty-five-minute documentary by Roberto Chiesi about a lost sequence from The Decameron
The Secret Humiliation of Chaucer (2006), a forty-seven-minute documentary by Chiesi about The Canterbury Tales
Via Pasolini, a documentary in which Pasolini discusses his views on language, film, and modern society
Pier Paolo Pasolini and the Form of the City (1974), a sixteen-minute documentary by Pasolini and Paolo Burnatto about the ancient Italian cities Orte and Sabaudia
Deleted scenes from Arabian Nights, with transcriptions of pages from the original script
Pasolini-approved English-dubbed track for The Canterbury Tales
Trailers
New English subtitle translations
PLUS: A booklet featuring essays by critic Colin MacCabe; Pasolini’s 1975 article “Trilogy of Life Rejected”; excerpts from Pasolini’s Berlin Film Festival press conference for The Canterbury Tales;and a report from the set of Arabian Nights by critic Gideon Bachmann

#635
Weekend (dir. Jean-Luc Godard, 1967)
Blu-ray and DVD

Nicely paired with Pasolini's towering anti-capitalist trilogy is Godard's anarchic, satirical masterpiece. An upper-class couple drive across France to collect on an inheritance, and civilization literally crumbles around them. That reads like a paraphrasing of Criterion's description, but I don't think you can synopsize it any other way.

Supplemental features:

New, restored high-definition digital transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
New video essay by film critic Kent Jones
Archival interviews with actors Mireille Darc and Jean Yanne and assistant director Claude Miller
Excerpt from a French television program on director Jean-Luc Godard, featuring on-set footage of Weekend shot by filmmaker Philippe Garrel
Trailers
PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic and novelist Gary Indiana

20 November 2012

-Release of the Month-
#636
Heaven's Gate (dir. Michael Cimino, 1980)
Blu-ray and DVD

My friend Jeff Wells has posted a few pieces about this movie recently. He disagrees that this movie is due a re-examination by the critical establishment. Just today, he's posted a response from F.X. Feeney, the guy most known for asking for a re-assessment of this, one of the biggest flops of all time.

I'm relatively certain that this is the first time that the 216-minute director's version has been available on home video.

Kris Kristofferson plays a Harvard grad turned Federal Marshal who heads way out west to Wyoming. It's a one-man-against-The-Man story set in the 1890's, and I've never seen it. John Hurt, Sam Waterson, Christopher Walken, Joseph Cotten, Jeff Bridges, Brad Dourif, Mickey Rourke, and Isabelle Huppert are in it too.

Like Ride With the Devil, another maligned western re-edited after the director's final version, Criterion is going to bat for a movie that may not actually be as bad as its reputation. This is my most-anticipated release of the fall, more so than Bond, Indiana Jones, or any of the high-profile blockbuster catalog titles.

Supplemental features:

New, restored transfer of director Michael Cimino’s cut of the film, supervised by Cimino
• New restoration of the 5.1 surround soundtrack, supervised by Cimino, in DTS-HD Master Audio on the Blu-ray edition
New illustrated audio interview with Cimino and producer Joann Carelli
New interviews with actor Kris Kristofferson, soundtrack arranger and performer David Mansfield, and second assistant director Michael Stevenson
The Johnson County War, a video interview with historian Bill O’Neal about the real-life conflict that inspired the film, and its resonance in popular culture
Trailer and TV spots
PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic and programmer Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan

Eclipse Series 37
When Horror Came to Shochiku
The X from Outer Space (dir. Kazui Nihonmatsu, 1967)
Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell (dir. Hajime Sato, 1968)
The Living Skeleton (dir. Hiroshi Matsuno, 1968)
Genocide (dir. Kazui Nihonmatsu, 1968)
DVD

Godzilla changed everything in Japanese commercial cinema. Monster movies could be huge business, so even a studio like Shochiku (better known for dramas like those made by Ozu or Mizoguchi) got into the game.

Two of the movies in this set are actually available on Hulu if you're a Hulu Plus subscriber: Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell and The X From Outer Space, which features a giant lizard-chicken monster.

Even if you are a die-hard monster movie fiend, you have probably not seen any of these. Even better? They are most excellent, even with microscopic budgets. These four movies include insect disaster horror, an undead pirate, an alien body-possession, and an "oh-god-we-brought-it-back-from-space" story.

November is going to be expensive for a lot of us.