Newsletter - FOR THE WEEK

OF January 23rd, 2017

Guuten takh!! A very full week with Blu-ray reviews from Criterion, Indicator, BFI, Studio Canal, Twilight Time, Artificial Eye, Olive, Lionsgate, Warner Archive of films by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, John Carpenter, Richard Fleischer, John Brahm, Ermanno Olmi, Nicolas Roeg, Aleksandr Sokurov, Richard Linklater, Carol Reed, Basil Dearden, William A. Wellman and more. Our Calendar has a Criterion April updates including films by Juzo Itami, George Stevens, Francis Ford Coppola, Wim Wenders and Jacques Demy and more. Feature Blu-ray and DVD is posted for JANUARY. We have a new article posted and a CONTEST with a Altered Innocence Blu-ray prize. Enjoy!!

NEW ARTICLE: The Movies from The End of the World - Identifying the Sub-Genres of Apocalypse Films!

DVDBeaver has their own store at Movie Zyng - check it out! Many have $1 shipping - even overseas!

Feature Blu-ray and DVD chosen for the Month of JANUARY!

FOLLOW US on TWITTER! (where we post important reviews, contests - prizes, polls, calendar updates - plus much more...)

(Week of) January 23rd CONTEST  identify the clip HERE to win a prize of an Altered Innocence Blu-ray of Concrete Night Best of luck!

If there are DVD or Blu-ray titles you'd like us to cover - please feel free to recommend!

Gary at 2ze dot com

Francofonia BD - Francofonia is the story of two remarkable men, louvre director Jacques Jaujard and Nazi Occupation officer Count Franziskus Wolff-Metternich - enemies then collaborators - whose alliance would be the driving force behind the preservation of museum treasures. v explores the relationship between art and power, the Louvre museum as a living example of civilization, and what art tells us about ourselves even in the midst of one of the bloodiest conflicts the world has ever seen. Blu-ray Release date: January 23rd, 2017

Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number! BD - A series of madcap events occurs when married real estate agent Tom Meade (Bob Hope) mistakenly dials the gorgeous European film star Didi (Elke Sommer) at her Oregon hotel. Didi, who has escaped Hollywood to avoid being typecast as a bombshell, takes up Meade's offer to hide away at his backwoods cabin. Meade, with the help of his housekeeper (Phyllis Diller), goes to absurd lengths to help the actress evade discovery by both the public and his suspicious wife (Marjorie Lord.) Blu-ray Release date: January 24th, 2017

The New Centurions BD - Somewhere, not too deep, inside "The New Centurions" is the soul of an old-fashioned B-movie police-force melodrama; the kind with a rookie cop and a kindly old sergeant and perhaps the sergeant's daughter. The traditional roles are much attenuated but they are there in Roy (Stacy Keach), the young patrolman; Kilvinsky (George C. Scott), his philosophic partner, about to retire; and Lorrie (Rosalind Cash), who comes along with the right proportion of sex, warm human values and chicken dinners just as Roy seems ready to go off the deep end because of a divorce, loneliness for Kilvinsky and a lost sense of vocation. Blu-ray Release Date: January 30th, 2017

Ghosts of Mars BD - Sci-fi feature directed by John Carpenter and starring Ice Cube, Natasha Henstridge and Jason Statham. The year is 2176 and Mars has been colonised by Earth, but the spirits of the old planet still continue to cause trouble. When a police team travels to a distant Martian mining outpost in search of the mass murder suspect Desolation Williams (Ice Cube), they find the place populated mostly by headless corpses. Williams is discovered locked in the town jail, and when the team is attacked by a mob of miners possessed by Martian spirits, it seems the jail might be the safest place for them all to be. Blu-ray Release Date: January 30th, 2017

Pool of London BD - Directed by Basil Dearden, 1951 Ealing classic Pool of London has been stunningly restored. Filmed on location in the City of London itself, on the River Thames and its wharves, on London Bridge and in the blitzed streets around St. Paul’s, this is an authentic and unmissable slice of film history. Everything changes for two sailors on shore leave when they inadvertently become caught up in a crime as murky as the great river itself. For one of them, Johnny, life is further complicated when he falls in love with Pat, a local ticket seller, forming one of the first inter-racial relationships in British film. Blu-ray Release date: October 24th, 2016

Sabotage (1939) BD - In this patriotic wartime drama set during WW II, a test plane crashes killing all aboard and causes the locals to accuse the aircraft engineer of being a traitor and sabotaging the plane. To prove his son's innocence, the engineer's father looks into the crash and soon reveals the real spies. The justifiably angry patriarch then delivers a stern lecture to the community about making hasty judgments concerning a person's patriotism. Blu-ray Release date: January 24th, 2017

John Carpenter's Vampires BD - John Carpenter’s Vampires (1998) stars the irrepressible James Woods as a Vatican-sanctioned vampire slayer assisted by a wise-cracking sidekick (Daniel Baldwin) and a naïve young priest (Tim Guinee); they’re pitted against a centuries-old vamp (Thomas Ian Griffith) in an attempt to retrieve a religious relic that will allow the nocturnal types to stalk the world in the full light of day. Also starring Maximilian Schell and Sheryl Lee, and featuring a terrific score by the versatile Carpenter. Indicator Blu-ray Release Date: January 30th, 2017

Battleground BD - December 1944. A civilian victim of the Battle of Bastogne scrounges through garbage to find a scrap of food. “I don’t even see those things,” a war-numbed GI says. “I want to remember them!” his buddy snaps. Bastogne veteran Robert Pirosh remembers with his Oscar-winning* screenplay for Battleground, a gripping tale of 101st Airborne troops resisting Hitler’s fierce, final counteroffensive. Directed by William A. Wellman (The Story of GI Joe), the superb cast includes James Whitmore as a bantam rooster of a sarge and Van Johnson as a wisecracking PFC (as in “Praying for Civilian”). Rugged and unsparing, Battleground — nominated for six Academy Awards including Best Picture — makes sure we all remember. Blu-ray Release Date: January 10th, 2017

The Blue Lamp BD - An immensely popular British crime film, Basil Dearden’s The Blue Lamp was scripted by ex-policeman T.E.B Clark, the writer who arguably did most to define Ealing Studio’s post-war identity. The film marked the first appearance of the character of Jack Warner – later to be immortalized in Dixon Of Dock Green. The story follows two London policemen whose daily routine is interrupted by a botched robbery and subsequent murder hunt. Starring Dirk Bogarde it was originally released in 1950. Blu-ray Release date: December 12th, 2016

The Man Between BD - A later collaboration between Mason and Carol Reed, The Man Between is often considered a companion piece to The Third Man thanks to its atmospheric portrayal of a city struggling to survive in a grim post-war reality of poverty and mistrust. The action is here transposed to a divided Berlin, and to the beginning of the Cold War. Unlike the devilish Harry Lime, Mason’s world-weary dealer Ivo Kerr is ultimately still a decent man, compelled by his love for a naïve schoolteacher to make one last misguided trip through the Brandenberg Gate, with potentially tragic consequences. Blu-ray Release Date: January 2nd, 2017

Before Sunrise BD - An exquisitely understated ode to the thrill of romantic possibility, the inaugural installment of The Before Trilogy opens with a chance encounter between two solitary young strangers. After they hit it off on a train bound for Vienna, the Paris university student Celine and the scrappy American tourist Jesse impulsively decide to spend a day together before he returns to the U.S. the next morning. As the pair roam the streets of the stately city, Richard Linklater’s tenderly observant gaze captures the uncertainty and intoxication of young love, from the first awkward stirrings of attraction to the hopeful promise that Celine and Jesse make upon their inevitable parting. Blu-ray Release Date: February 28th, 2017

Before Sunset BD - Richard Linklater’s gorgeous follow up to his equally brilliant 1995 film Before Sunrise, finds us catching up with the characters nine years later. Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy play Jesse and Celine, two free spirits who met and possibly fell in love in Vienna nine years earlier, and planned a youthfully romantic follow-up love tryst, doomed to failure. Fate reunites the two as the film unfolds in real time, taking the form of an 80-minute walk around Paris. The dialogue, written by the two principle leads and based on a scenario by Linklater and co-writer Kim Krizan, perfectly captures the starts and stops, uneasy transitions and circumlocutions of real life conversation. Blu-ray Release Date: February 28th, 2017

Before Midnight BD - Every nine years, they get together to talk about love, and their conversation is unique in the annals of film. Unique, because this is an ongoing fiction so well-crafted by its principals, director Richard Linklater plus actors Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke all collaborating on the script, that it plays like documented fact, a kind of 7 Up primer on life’s romantic vicissitudes. From their chance encounter in Vienna (Before Sunrise) to their reconnection in Paris (Before Sunset) to their sojourn here, we meet the couple, Celine and Jesse, infrequently but at points of peak intensity, and those isolated moments form a continuum that seems palpably real – like us, they have aged and compromised and lost big battles that now look trivial and won victories that could prove Pyrrhic. For them too, time has spoken, and only time will tell. Blu-ray Release Date: February 28th, 2017

The Man Who Fell to Earth BD - The Man Who Fell to Earth is a daring exploration of science fiction as an art form. The story of an alien on an elaborate rescue mission provides the launching pad for Nicolas Roeg’s visual tour de force, a formally adventurous examination of alienation in contemporary life. Rock legend David Bowie completely embodies the title role, while Candy Clark, Buck Henry, and Rip Torn turn in pitch-perfect supporting performances. The film’s hallucinatory vision was obscured in the American theatrical release, which deleted nearly twenty minutes of crucial scenes and details. Lionsgate Blu-ray Release Date: January 24th, 2017

The Tree of Wooden Clogs BD - A painterly and sensual immersion in late nineteenth-century Italian farm life, Ermanno Olmi’s The Tree of Wooden Clogs lovingly focuses on four families working for one landowner on an isolated estate in the province of Bergamo. Filming on an abandoned farm for four months, Olmi adapted neorealist techniques to tell his story, enlisting local people to live as their own ancestors had, speaking in their native dialect on locations with which they were intimately familiar. Through the cycle of seasons, of backbreaking labor, love and marriage, birth and death, faith and superstition, Olmi naturalistically evokes an existence very close to nature, celebrating its beauty, humor, and simplicity but also acknowledging the feudal cruelty that governs it. Winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1978, The Tree of Wooden Clogs is intimate in scale but epic in scope—a towering, heart-stirring work of humanist filmmaking. Blu-ray Release Date: February 14th, 2017

The Mad Magician 2D + 3D BD - For their final entry in the 1950s 3-D craze, Columbia decided to have producer Bryan Foy attempt to duplicate the success of the movie that started it all, House of Wax- Foy employed the star (Price) and the scriptwriter (Crane Wilbur) from that picture and created a very similar story of gruesome revenge tinged with tongue-in-cheek humor. The result, The Mad Magician (1954), was filmed in sparkling black-and-white and 3-D. Twilight Time Blu-ray Release date: January, 2017

The Barefoot Contessa BD - Writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz gives us a bitter tale of stardom won and wasted in The Barefoot Contessa (1954), a film à clef about a Rita Hayworth-style Spanish dancer (Ava Gardner) who becomes an international movie star. Her sympathetic guide is a writer/director/ Mankiewicz surrogate (Humphrey Bogart); Edmond O’Brien won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar® playing the public relations lackey of a Howard Hughes-like mogul (Warren Stevens); and the film is stunningly photographed by the one and only Jack Cardiff (The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus). Twilight Time Blu-ray Release date: January, 2017
 

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