Newsletter - FOR THE WEEK

OF February 8th, 2010

This Week's Highlights

Tu-cubin-noonie! - 17 new reviews this week with some BIG titles moved to Blu-ray - From Kurosawa's RAN to Ophul's Lola Montes, Munau's City Girl to modern classics Revanche and Hunger. New additions (Eisenstein, Lynch, Peckinpah, Soderbergh, Lucio Fulci + Sergio Corbucci! etc. coming to Blu-ray) to the release calendar, forthcoming out-of-print warning for 22 Criterions, New Rosenbaum article! and another a new Contest with a great prize.

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DVD and Blu-ray of the Year 2009

FEATURE DVD and Blu-ray chosen for the month of February HERE

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

Gary at 2ze dot com

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LATEST ADDITIONS to the Calendar: (PRE-ORDER & save!):

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Naked Weapon BD - Imagine my surprise when “Naked Weapon”, a movie written by Jing Wong, the man behind such lackluster fare as “The Duel” and “High Risk”, turned out to be one of the more entertaining films I’ve seen in a long while. The movie, about young girls abducted (some lured by promises of wealth) into the training camp of one Madame M to be her next elite international assassin, is a Chicks Kick Ass flick in the vein of “Charlie’s Angels”, but with the sensibility of a Playboy Wet and Wild video, and the balls of Hong Kong action films like Tsui Hark’s “Time and Tide.” “Naked Weapon” is half exploitation and half balls-out action. Director Siu-Tung Ching handles both angles exceptionally well. Blu-ray Release date: April 23rd, 2009

RAN BD - With Ran, legendary director Akira Kurosawa reimagines Shakespeare’s King Lear as a singular historical epic set in sixteenth-century Japan. Majestic in scope, the film is Kurosawa’s late-life masterpiece, a profound examination of the folly of war and the crumbling of one family under the weight of betrayal, greed, and the insatiable thirst for power. Lions Gate / Maple Films Blu-ray Release Date February 16th, 2010

Ong Bak - The Thai Warrior BD - The gist of the plot for the original movie is fairly simple and pretends to no comment, subtle or otherwise, about the human condition: "Ong Bak" is the name the villagers give to their stone Buddha head, believed tied to the health and welfare of the village. A wise guy from the city arrives and, failing to do business with locals as he expected, steals Ong Bak in hopes to curry favor with a gangster, leaving the villagers despondent and concerned for their future. Ting (Jaa) volunteers to go the city and retrieve the stone.Blu-ray Release date: February 2nd, 2010

One Missed Call - The American remake of ONE MISSED CALL is bad but not as bad as I expected from a remake of an Asian horror film. The reason for this is because the Japanese original was a tongue-in-cheek spin on the popular J-horror genre so the American version's more straightforward approach doesn't draw direct comparisons with the finer points of the original (although the major set-piece death in the remake is nowhere near as audacious as that of the original). Lead Sossamon fares well as does Burns but only because his "in it for the paycheck" non-committal performance suits the cardboard character. DVD Release Date: August 18th, 2008

Walk the Line BD - Stories about addiction are now commonplace, and the concept of "co-dependence" is generally understood, if a little abused itself - a familiar tale of how one person in a relationship, despite intentions as often as not, encourages the addiction. What's not so common is a story where one person holds fast, not so much out of the principle of "tough love" but because it's fundamentally the right thing to do – they were, after all, both married to other people for much of the time they were colleagues on stage before they married in 1968. To Johnny Cash, June Carter was not only the girl of his boyhood infatuation, but an angel that would become the means to a second (and a third and a fourth) chance. Blu-ray Release date: February 2nd, 2010

The Ladykillers BD - THE LADYKILLERS, director Alexander Mackendrick's third Ealing farce, is the final comedy produced by the famous studio and one of its most celebrated. Alec Guinness stars as the superbly shifty, toothily threatening Professor Marcus, the leader of a crime ring planning a heist. Marcus rents rooms from a sweet, eccentric old lady, Mrs. Wilberforce (Katie Johnson), in her crooked London house. The professor and his co-conspirators, blowhard Major Courtney (Cecil Parker), creepily suave Louis (Herbert Lom), chubby Harry (Peter Sellers), and muscleman One-Round (Danny Green), pose as an unlikely string quartet using the rooms for rehearsal. Dodging Mrs. Wilberforce's constant interruptions, the hoods hit upon the idea to use her in the daring daylight robbery (filmed in and around London's Kings Cross station). When the old girl discovers the truth, Marcus and company cannot persuade her to stay buttoned up about it and thus decide to do her in. Blu-ray Release Date: February 16th, 2010

Death Journey - After two witnesses scheduled to testify against suspected gang leader Rosewald (Patrick McCullough) meet with unfortunate "accidents," the New York District Attorney Virgil Riley (Art Maier) is able to postpone the trial 48 hours in order to transport Rosewald's accountant Finley (Bernard Kirby) from California. He enlists ex-cop Jessie Crowder (Fred Williamson) to protect Kirby on the cross-country trip fraught with hitmen wielding guns, knives, and martial arts skills (and easy women) to hinder their journey to New York in time for the trial. That's all there really is to it. DEATH JOURNEY is more conventional than MEAN JOHNNY BARROWS in that it gets the exposition out of the way (stopping for about 5 minutes to establish Crowder's martial arts skills - some of that running time in slow motion) and onto a series of repetitive (though mostly entertaining) fight scenes interspersed with Crowder bedding women he and Finley run into along the way. Williamson's charisma and Kirby's comic reactions to Crowder's inevitable bedding of each woman he meets are the most successful aspects of this film and he's got at least one more trick up his sleeve for the ending. DVD Release Date: March 16th, 2010

Mean Johnny Barrows - Kicked out of the service for punching his commanding officer, disgraced former football star/Vietnam war hero Johnny Barrows (Fred Williamson). On his first night back in L.A., he gets mugged and then arrested and harassed by cops. Determined to make an honest living, Johnny repeatedly refuses the job offers of mobster/former football rival Mario Racconi (Stuart Whitman) and the temptations of Mario's girl Nancy (Jenny Sherman) in favor of job hunting, soup lines, and sweeping up around a gas station for board and little pay. When the New York mobster Don Da Vince (Tony Caruso) and his sons (Mike Henry and Roddy McDowall) move in on the Racconi turf and open a flower shop as a front for dealing dope (specifically targeting black and Chicano customers), Don Racconi (Luther Adler) tries to put a stop to it. When the Da Vinces take out Racconi and critically injure Mario, he appeals to Johnny to wipe out the Da Vinces in exchange for $100,000 and a prime piece of land (as well as Nancy who is either double crossing him or duping the Da Vinces). DVD Release Date: March 16th, 2010

More - ...this dark tale, based on a true story, follows the naive Stefan (Klaus Grunberg) in his pursuit of offbeat American Estelle (Mimsy Farmer) to the island paradise of Ibiza. He leads a seemingly idyllic life with her by the sea - where the scenic beauties and delights of LSD and nude sunbathing are fully revealed by Nestor Almendros' stunning photography - before succumbing to the destructive trappings of heroin addiction. DVD Release Date: July 3rd, 2003

Lotte Reiniger Fairy Tale - Reiniger began her career in Germany and in 1926 made The Adventures of Prince Achmed (available on BFI DVD), one of the first and most ingenious full-length animated films in the history of cinema. Her first film adaptation of a fairy tale was Cinderella in 1922. She moved to Britain in the 1930s where she joined the GPO Film Unit and later worked for the Crown Film Unit of the COI. From 1952 onwards, Reiniger, together with her husband Carl Koch, created a series of fairy-tale films for Primrose Productions based on the Brothers Grimm, Wilhelm Hauff, Hans Christian Andersen and the stories from One Thousand and One Nights. DVD Release Date: November 17th, 2008

Radio On - A British film about alienation, asphalt, and narrative disconnections, coproduced by Wim Wenders's German company. Director Christopher Petit, a former film critic, slips into Wenders's style—the cool, austere black-and-white images, the blank underplaying—as if he were taking it for a test drive: he wants to see what it can do, what its strengths are and where its weaknesses lie. Seizing on an archetypal Wenders situation—a car trip that becomes a metaphor for an emotional pilgrimage—Petit inspects and abstracts Wenders's ideas. The film is dull and distant, though not objectionably so—it seems to be the effect Petit has in mind. The relationships between his isolated, distracted characters are reproduced in the movie's low-key appeal to its audience. DVD Release Date: May 26th, 2008

Gervaise - One of France’s most respected directors of the postwar era, René Clément created such intense psychological dramas as Forbidden Games and Purple Noon. The equally gripping Gervaise, his vivid adaptation of Émile Zola’s 1877 masterpiece L’assommoir, is an uncompromising depiction of a laundress’s struggles with an alcoholic husband while running her own business. Gervaise was nominated for an Oscar and earned Maria Schell best actress honors at the Venice Film Festival. DVD Release Date: September 15th, 2009

Revanche BD - A gripping thriller and a tragic drama of nearly Greek proportions, Revanche is the stunning, Oscar-nominated international breakthrough of Austrian filmmaker Götz Spielmann. In a ragged section of Vienna, hardened ex-con Alex (the mesmerizing Johannes Krisch) works in a brothel, where he falls for Ukrainian hooker Tamara. Their desperate plans for escape unexpectedly intersect with the lives of a rural cop and his seemingly content wife. With meticulous, elegant direction, Spielmann creates a tense, existential, and surprising portrait of vengeance and redemption, and a journey into the darkest forest of human nature, in which violence and beauty exist side by side. DVD + Blu-ray Release Date :February 16th, 2010

Hunger BD - With Hunger, British filmmaker and artist Steve McQueen has turned one of history’s most controversial acts of political defiance into a jarring, unforgettable cinematic experience. In Northern Ireland’s Maze prison in 1981, twenty-seven-year-old Irish Republican Army member Bobby Sands went on a hunger strike to protest the British government’s refusal to recognize him and his fellow IRA inmates as political prisoners. McQueen dramatizes prison existence and Sands’s final days in a way that is purely experiential, even abstract, a succession of images full of both beauty and horror. Featuring an intense performance by Michael Fassbender, Hunger is an unflinching, transcendent depiction of what a human being is willing to endure to be heard. DVD + Blu-ray Release Date :February 16th, 2010

Ong Bak 2 BD - Tony Jaa and his movie make for comparison to the popular Indian actor from the 1940s and 1950s, Sabu, and Zoltan Korda's Jungle Book in particular. Sabu, though as spirited as Jaa, is soulful, romantic, vulnerable. His Mowgli is interested in others, and he's courageous, but he is distracted by vengeance and a fear of those who look like him but aren't. Mowgli possesses not nearly the same means to accomplish his aims as Tien, which makes his adventure that much more accessible to the imagination. He needs only to level the playing field with a "tooth" of proper proportion and power. Such subtlety does not lend itself to a story as preoccupied by cruelty and numbers as Ong Bak 2. Tony Jaa is not nearly as pretty as Sabu, and Tien has no sense of humor whatsoever. He does possess much the same degree of determination and is perfectly willing to risk death to carry out his vengeance, and even displays a certain degree of style as he goes about it. Blu-ray Release date: February 2nd, 2010

Lola Montes BD - Andrew Sarris in 1963 dubbed this film the greatest ever made, and although he's noted for his quirky opinions, he's no fool. A masterpiece, LOLA MONTES is certainly director Max Ophüls' greatest achievement. In flashback, we take a fascinating look at the life of the passionate yet oddly passive title character (Carol, more perfect in the part than she could possibly have fathomed). Introduced by a New Orleans circus master (Ustinov), the aging Lola answers (or has answered for her) personal questions from the audience for a small fee. The ringmaster tells of her many romances throughout Europe, including one with Franz Liszt (Quadflieg) and another with the king of Bavaria (Walbrook). In the last scene, Lola (who throughout has been made to perform various acts like a well-trained seal) stands atop a high platform, preparing for a dangerous jump. Her health is as precarious as her position, yet the ringmaster removes the safety net. The finale is unforgettable. Blu-ray Release Date :February 16th, 2010

City Girl BD - After the visual fireworks of Sunrise and the now-lost splendour of 4 Devils, F.W. Murnau turned his attention to this vivid, painterly study of an impulsive and fragile marriage among the wheatfields of Minnesota. During a brief stay in Chicago, innocent farmer’s son Lem falls for and weds Kate, a hard-bitten but lonely waitress. Upon bringing her home at the start of harvest time, the honeymoon soon turns into a claustrophobic struggle as they contend with the bitter scorn of his father and the invasive, leering jealousy of the farm’s labouring community. Tenderly romantic and tough-minded in equal measure, City Girl is one of cinema’s great pastorals, featuring some of the most delicate performances Murnau ever filmed and influencing directors such as Terrence Malick and Jean Vigo. Blu-ray Release Date: February 22nd, 2010
 

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