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Privilege
BD - Peter Watkins is the
supreme master and very nearly the inventor of the
pseudo-documentary, which he uses as an unorthodox way of
recounting history or projecting contemporary trends into the
near-future. This dystopian New Yorker release is about the
fascist takeover of Great Britain, with a duped and manipulated
messianic rock singer (Paul Jones, lead singer of Manfred Mann
in his first film role) used as a political as well as marketing
tool. Blu-ray Release Date: May
17th, 2010
Letters from Fontainhas: Three Films by
Pedro Costa - One of the most important artists
on the international film scene today, Portuguese director Pedro
Costa has been steadily building an impressive body of work
since the late eighties. And these are the three films that put
him on the map: spare, painterly portraits of battered, largely
immigrant lives in the slums of Fontainhas, a neighborhood on
the outskirts of Lisbon. Hypnotic, controlled works, Ossos, In
Vanda’s Room, and Colossal Youth confirm Costa as a provocative
new cinematic poet, one who locates beauty in the most unlikely
of places. DVD Release Date: March 30th, 2010
Legend of the Tsunami Warrior
BD - You’ll be very pleased
to learn that this story has nothing whatever to do with
tsunamis. I haven’t come up with a suitable title, but “Stingray
vs. Black Ray” would have been closer to the mark. The
international title "Queens of Langkasuka" might lead you to
think there is more than one queen in play. There isn't. But
there are princesses of some importance, so perhaps the Thai's
don't make the same distinction as we in the West.
Blu-ray Release date: May 11th,
2010
High Anxiety
BD - Brooks plays Dr.
Richard Thorndyke, a psychiatrist with a serious case of
acrophobia, who arrives at the Psycho-Neurotic Institute for the
Very, Very Nervous as its new director. Victoria Brisbane
(Madeline Kahn) is the daughter of one of its inmates locked
away in the hospital’s roach motel. Victoria believes that her
father is not insane and tries to convince Thorndyke that the
hospital is holding him there for some clandestine purpose. Dr.
Montague (Harvey Korman), who has a penchant for whips and
chains, is wonderfully transparent as the villain of the piece.
Look for director Barry Levinson standing in for Norman Bates.
Release date: May 11th, 2010
History of the World- Part 1
BD - The childish bathroom
humor that seeped into High Anxiety ripens to maturity in this
vulgar, R-Rated disaster of a movie that, despite itself,
manages some of Brook's funniest moments. Brooks covers the
history of mankind from caveman to the French Revolution, with
some segments hardly a minute in length, two others closer to
half an hour. Sid Caesar is funny as the caveman leader. Mel
Brooks is not funny as Moses who walks over his best line as he
delivers the fifteen commandments to the Israelites. Madeline
Kahn is Roman Empress Nympho (that says it all). Pamela
Stephenson is a reluctant succulent willing to do anything to
get Louis XVI to let her father out of the Bastille. Harvey
Korman is the lecherous Count de Monet. Orson Welles is bored as
the Narrator. I think that much of the movie would have played
better as 1 or 2-panel cartoons. By this time Brooks had become
lazy as director. Blu-ray
Release date: May 11th, 2010
Robin Hood - Men in Tights
BD - Well, Mel, it's been
quite a climb, sort of like the one by Dante and Virgil. He
started with the likes of The Producers, Blazing Saddles and
Young Frankenstein and ended with Robin Hood: Men in Tights.
Itself a parody of the Reynolds/Costner Robin Hood: Prince of
Thieves, Brook's final movie to date is a better vehicle for
sending up, or hommaging, or whatever, than To Be or Not To Be -
this much is certain. I like the title and the line by the
generally underrated Cary Elwes ("Unlike some other Robin Hoods,
I can speak with an English accent.") A couple of the supporting
actors are worth our time: Roger Rees as the Sheriff of
Rottingham and the awesome Tracey Ullman as Latrine, the ugliest
witch on the planet with a yen for Prince John.
Blu-ray Release date: May 11th,
2010
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, from the Lewis Carroll
classic, is a major disappointment. Superior stylistic settings
and often terrific process effects are largely wasted by the
limp, lifeless pacing of adapter-director William Sterling.
DVD Release Date: March 8th, 2010
Passion and Poetry - The Ballad of Sam
Peckinpah - Mike Siegel's "Passion & Poetry: The
Ballad of Sam Peckinpah" takes its viewers on monumental
two-hour tour of the life and works of Sam Peckinpah. Peckinpah,
now perhaps equally remembered for both his work and violent
imagery than his name brings to mind, has of course been the
subject of many biographical works, which is why his most
zealous followers may find little new information here. Yes, we
do hear the same old nuggets of the meaning behind the violence
and his tempestuous relationship with his female leads, but we
do also get some anecdotes that even Peckinpah aficionados will
likely find novel. Even on top of this, Siegel includes
interviews with those close to the director that offer a
revisionist account of the tortured and sometimes brutal life
story that has become the dominant narrative of his life. DVD
Release Date: August 14th, 2009
Picnic at Hanging Rock
BD - Twenty years after it
swept Australia into the international film spotlight, Peter
Weir's stunning 1975 masterpiece remains as ineffable as the
unanswerable mystery at its core. A Valentine's Day picnic at an
ancient volcanic outcropping turns to disaster for the residents
of Mrs. Appleyard's school when a few young girls inexplicably
vanish on Hanging Rock. A lyrical, meditative film charged with
suppressed longings. Blu-ray
Release Date: May 2010
By Brakhage
BD - Working completely
outside the mainstream, the wildly prolific, visionary Stan
Brakhage made more than 350 films over a half century.
Challenging all taboos in his exploration of “birth, sex, death,
and the search for God,” he has turned his camera on explicit
lovemaking, childbirth, even autopsy. Many of his most famous
works pursue the nature of vision itself and transcend the act
of filming. Some, including the legendary Mothlight, were made
without using a camera at all, as he pioneered the art of making
images directly on film, by drawing, painting, and scratching.
Criterion is proud to present twenty-six masterworks by Stan
Brakhage. Blu-ray Release Date:
May 25th, 2010
The Reckless Moment -
Having concealed her daughter's accidental killing of her seedy
older lover, upper middle class housewife Bennett finds herself
being blackmailed by a loan shark; fortunately for her, the man
he sends - small-time crook and loner Mason - becomes infatuated
with Bennett, and ends up killing his partner. Ophüls' noir
melodrama, like his previous film, Caught, can be seen as a
subtle, subversive critique of American ambitions and
class-structures: in committing the moral and legal
transgression of concealing a corpse, Bennett is merely
protecting the comfort and respectability of her family life,
and the irony is that Mason's self-sacrifice, made on her
behalf, simply serves to preserve the status quo that has
relegated him to the role of social outcast. This sense of
waste, however, is implied rather than emphasized by Ophüls'
elegant, low key direction, which counterpoints the stylization
of Burnett Guffey's shadowy photography with long, mobile takes
that stress the everyday reality of the milieu. A marvelous,
tantalizing thriller, it also features never-better performances
from Mason and Bennett. Carlotta DVD Release Date: April 7th,
2010
The Boy With Green Hair -
Made in the hopeful post-World War II era that produced such
classics of social conscience as Gentlemen’s Agreement, Pinky
and Home of the Brave, this provocative film is a fable for its
time – and ours. It tells the supernatural-tinged story of an
orphan who finds a safe haven in small-town America…until the
day his hair turns green. Then the townfolk turn against him,
frightened by the change they cannot understand. A call for
tolerance, an inspiring statement that “different” doesn’t mean
“threatening,” The Boy with Green Hair boasts a fine cast
(Robert Ryan, Pat O’Brien, Dean Stockwell), a popular theme song
(Nature Boy) and the feature-film debut of director Joseph Losey
(The Servant, The Go-Between). DVD Release Date: December
1st, 2009
Crime School - Out of the
frying pan into the inferno for Frankie, Squirt, Goofy, Spike
and the rest of their pals. They’ve been grabbed off slum
streets and sent to reform school. There, they’ll be changed.
Brutally changed into hardened criminals unless a compassionate
defender stands up for them. One year after his corrosive
influence on slum kids as Baby Face Martin in Dead End, Humphrey
Bogart portrays a champion of wayward boys in this
social-conscience movie. Playing the boys: Dead End’s Leo Gorcey,
Huntz Hall, Billy Halop and more, beginning their memorable
string of Warner Bros. Dead End Kids films that includes Angels
with Dirty Faces and the Crime School remake Hell’s Kitchen.
DVD Release Date: August 4th, 2009
Eclipse 20 - Shaw on Film -
The hugely influential, Nobel Prize–winning critic and
playwright George Bernard Shaw was notoriously reluctant to
allow his writing to be adapted for the cinema. Yet thanks to
the persistence of Hungarian producer Gabriel Pascal, Shaw
finally agreed to collaborate on a series of screen versions of
his witty, socially minded plays, starting with the
Oscar-winning Pygmalion. The three other films that resulted
from this famed alliance, Major Barbara, Caesar and Cleopatra,
and Androcles and the Lion, long overshadowed by the sensation
of Pygmalion, are gathered here for the first time on DVD. These
clever, handsomely mounted entertainments star such luminaries
of the big screen as Vivien Leigh, Claude Rains, Wendy Hiller,
and Rex Harrison. DVD Release Date: February 23rd, 2010
Tooth Fairy
BD - Perhaps it's that broad
smile, so unexpected from a man the size of a small mountain and
twice as strong, but there's something very endearing about this
movie that transcends cliché. And speaking of smiles – or,
rather, grins – there's Stephen Merchant (The Office in the
U.K.), who looks like a character right out Dr. Seuss. Merchant
plays Tracy, a fairy with a mildly spiteful attitude about his
job, probably because he suffers from wings envy. He hasn't got
'em. Never did. Isn't likely to get them.
Blu-ray Release date: May 4th, 2010
Ninja Assassin - The film
wastes no time getting to what it does best - wall to wall
action sequences that are often gory. The most surprising aspect
of this film is that is does a pretty good job of building the
back story of the ninja assassin character named Raizo. Even
though the plot deals with government cover ups and the Europol
agent named Mika Coretti plays an integral part to the evolution
of the story at hand. The real meat and potatoes of this film is
Raizo's quest for revenge against his former mentor (a plot
device that anyone familiar enough with martial arts can easily
appreciate). DVD Release Date: March 16th, 2010
Diamonds of the Night -
Another outstanding example of Czech New Wave cinema, DIAMONDS
OF THE NIGHT was directed in 1964 by the 27-year-old Jan Nemec
and based on the writings of Holocaust survivor Arnost Lustig.
Running just over an hour, the film compresses four days in the
lives of two Jewish boys (Ladislav Jansky and Antonin Kumbera)
who, while being transferred to a concentration camp, jump from
the transport and escape into the woods. Physically and mentally
exhausted, hungry, lost, and desperate, they scrounge for food
and shelter and are later chased and caught by a group of old
men, only to be released. As their fatigue increases, the boys
begin to hallucinate, imagining that the trees are falling down
on them or that swarms of ants are crawling on their bodies.
Perhaps even more impressive than the startling visual
style--there is much hand-held camerawork, and a sense of
realism or, as Nemec would call it, "dream realism"--is the
sound or the lack thereof. DIAMONDS OF THE NIGHT is practically
without dialog, and there are long stretches in which nothing is
heard but the ticking of a clock or the sound of breathing.
DVD Release Date: May 10th, 2010
City of the Living Dead
BD - When Father Thomas (Fabrizio
Javone) hangs himself, the sacrilegious act causes the Gates of
Hell to open beneath the Dunwich cemetery. Mary (Catriona
MacColl), a medium, witnesses this event during a séance in New
York and apparently dies of shock but wakes up to find herself
entombed in a buried coffin. Fortunately, meddling reporter
Peter Bell (Christopher George) comes to her rescue (although he
nearly kills her in the process) and together they hit the road
in search of Dunwhich to shut the Gates of Hell before All
Saints' Day when the dead will walk the earth but strange (read:
gory) things are already beginning to happen in the town since
Father Thomas killed himself. UK
Blu-ray Release Date: May 24th, 2010 |
