Newsletter - FOR THE WEEK

OF May 29th, 2017

Hyvää päivää! Strong week with Blu-ray reviews of packages by Criterion, Masters of Cinema, Arrow, Twilight Time, BFI, Kino Lorber, Artificial Eye, Blue Underground, Koch Media, Studio Canal, Genius Products, Funimation of films by Jacques Rivette, François Truffaut, Alfred Hitchcock, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Sam Peckinpah, Max Ophuls, Georges Franju, Asghar Farhadi, Nathan Juran, Roy Ward Baker, Jesús Franco and many more. Our Calendar has a updates from last week including August Criterions of films by Michael Curtiz, Sacha Guitry, Alex Cox, Ronald Neame, Mike Leigh, Federico Fellini, John Frankenheimer, Mike Nichols, Danny Boyle, Mario Bava, Luc Besson, Sergio Leone and more. Our Feature Blu-ray and DVD is posted for MAY. We have a new article posted and a CONTEST with another BRAND NEW INDICATOR Blu-ray prize. Enjoy!!

NEW PAGES:

Shopping Guide for Blu-rays at Amazon.FR (France)

ESSENTIAL NOIR on Blu-ray!

Shopping Guide for Blu-rays at Amazon.DE (Germany)

LATEST ARTICLE: The Beauties of Star Trek (TOS)

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 MAY!

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

(Week of) May 29th CONTEST  identify the clip HERE to win a prize of a BRAND NEW Indicator Blu-ray of Housekeeping 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

Daughter of the Nile BD - Taiwanese auteur Hou Hsiao-hsien (The Assassin, Three Times, Flight of the Red Balloon) followed up his highly acclaimed Coming of Age trilogy of films with Daughter of the Nile, a rich and poignant drama about a young woman struggling to support her family amidst the violent and neon-soaked milieu of 1980's Taipei. Lin (Lin Hsiao-yang) works as a waitress in a fried chicken restaurant, attends night school and pines after her brother s friend, local gigolo Ah-sang (Fan Yang). Increasingly constrained by the casual brutality of the world around her, Lin finds escape imagining herself as the titular Daughter of the Nile, a character from her favourite manga series. Blu-ray Release date: May 29th, 2017

Spotlight on a Murderer BD - When the terminally ill Count Hervé de Kerloquen (Pierre Brasseur, Goto, Isle of Love) vanishes without trace, his heirs are told that they have to wait five years before he can be declared legally dead, forcing them to devise ways of paying for the upkeep of the vast family château in the meantime. While they set about transforming the place into an elaborate son et lumière tourist attraction, they are beset by a series of tragic accidents if that's really what they are... Blu-ray Release date: May 29th - 30th, 2017

Fu Manchu Double Feature BD - The first of several collaborations between cult director Jesus Franco and British producer Harry Alan Towers, this horror-tinged adventure is full of jungle action, creative murders, and violent sexual sadism. Christopher Lee portrays the mysterious Asian madman Fu Manchu, plotting world domination from his secret headquarters underneath the Amazon rainforest. Fu has discovered a rare poison which affects only men, and uses it as lipstick for ten beautiful women, who are to deliver a kiss of death to each of 10 public officials. Blu-ray Release date: May 30th, 2017

First Men in the Moon BD - Special effects maestro Ray Harryhausen’s First Men in the Moon (1964) posits a modern-day U.N. lunar mission which discovers – lo and behold! – that a motley little 19th-century human crew has beaten them to it. Edward Judd, Martha Hyer and the inimitable Lionel Jeffries are the intrepid explorers, encountering everything from a giant centipede to some particularly nasty oversize insectoid creatures. Koch Media Blu-ray Release Date: February 23rd, 2017

The Salesman BD - With the camera’s sidelong glances at its characters and lingering shots of its settings, that atmosphere of anxiety in the face of half-perceived or ill-explained events hovers over the whole film. The protagonists are the high-school teacher Emad and his wife Rana (played by Shahab Hosseini and Taraneh Alidoosti), both of them amateur actors appearing as Willy and Linda Loman in Death of a Salesman. Now desperate to find a new apartment, they accept an offer from a colleague and move into a place where the previous tenant mysteriously refuses to remove her belongings. The neighbours imply that she’s a prostitute but the apartment is also filled with evidence of her and her child’s apparently happy existence. Artificial Eye Blu-ray Release date: May 29th, 2017

Tough Guys BD - Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas team up one last time in Tough Guys. Harry Doyle (Lancaster) and Archie Lang (Douglas) are two old-time train robbers, who held up a train in 1956 and have been incarcerated for thirty years. After serving their time, they are released from jail and have to adjust to a new life of freedom, now as old men. Harry and Archie realize that they still have the pizzazz when, picking up their prison checks at a bank, they foil a robbery attempt. Blu-ray Release date: May 30th, 2017

The Earrings of Madame de... BD - French master Max Ophuls's most cherished work, The Earrings of Madame de . . . is an emotionally profound, cinematographically adventurous tale of false opulence and tragic romance. When the aristocratic woman known only as Madame de (the extraordinary Danielle Darrieux) sells her earrings, unbeknownst to her husband (Charles Boyer), in order to pay personal debts, she sets off a chain reaction, the financial and carnal consequences of which can only end in despair. Ophuls adapts Louise de Vilmorin's incisive fin de siècle novel with virtuosic camera work so elegant and precise it’s been called the equal to that of Orson Welles. BFI Blu-ray Release Date: May 22nd, 2017

Speed Racer (Complete Series) BD - One of the most iconic shows of the 60s and 70s. Now for the first time on Blu-ray, you can share the beloved classic with friends and family from all generations. On your mark, get set, GO! GO! GO! Speed Racer is an 18-year-old boy who dreams of driving his car, the incredible Mach 5, in professional races around the world. When the going gets tough and meddling crooks keep him from the finish line, he always finds a way to make it through. Join Trixie, Pops, Spritle, Chim Chim, and the whole gang as they root for Speed in the most nail-biting, death-defying races in history! Blu-ray Release date: May 30th, 2017

The Lodger (1927) BD - All of London is in an uproar due to recent attacks by a Jack the Ripper-style serial killer known as "The Avenger" who targets blonde women. During this time, a pale, hypersensitive stranger arrives at a family-owned boarding house to take up lodging. He becomes attracted to the proprietor's pretty blonde daughter Daisy, who is already engaged to a policeman. Daisy, in spite of her parents' objections, returns the lodger's overtures. When the trail of the killer leads to the same district in which the boarding house is located, the lodger's strange behavior places him under suspicion by the family. Criterion Blu-ray Release Date: June 27th, 2017

Downhill (1927) BD - Superlative technique from the 27-year-old Hitchcock almost – but not quite – compensates for the major script problems. Camerawork is consistently imaginative and ahead-of-its-time, including some startling hand-held sequences towards the end as Roddy staggers, fever-stricken, off a boat. Most breathtakingly virtuouso touch is a complex shot pulling back from Roddy adjusting his tie – we think he's dressing up for a fancy evening out, then realise he's working as a waiter, and then realise he's playing a waiter on stage. Brilliantly done. Criterion Blu-ray Release Date: June 27th, 2017

Straw Dogs BD - Sam Peckinpah examines the instinctual capacity for violence in his controversial 1971 film, loosely based on the novel The Siege of Trencher's Farm. To avoid the Vietnam-era social chaos in the U.S., American mathematician David Sumner (Dustin Hoffman) moves with his British wife, Amy (Susan George), to the isolated Cornish town where she grew up, but their presence provokes antagonism among the village's men. As the hostilities escalate from routine bullying to the gang rape of his wife, David finds his pacifistic self backed into a corner. When the hooligans attack his house, David finally resorts to the gruesome violence that he abhors. Criterion Blu-ray Release Date: June 27th, 2017

Inferno (2D + 3D) BD - Tough business tycoon Donald Whitley Carson III (Robert Ryan) tests his own mettle when left to die in the Mojave Desert following a riding accident, which broke his leg. When he realises that his scheming wife Geraldine (Rhonda Fleming) and her lover Joseph Duncan (William Lundigan), his business partner, have left him to perish, he is determined to best them and survive to wreak his revenge. Twilight Time Blu-ray Release date: May 2017

King Kong (1976) BD - The movie Dino De Laurentiis wanted to sell with the line "When Kong dies, everybody cries" is a camp-infested update of the 1933 classic. With a script by Lorenzo Semple Jr., creator of the similarly tongue-in-cheek Batman television series, this version of Kong is loaded with silly dialogue and situations. On this occasion, the sea voyage is reconfigured as executive Charles Grodin leads his crew in search of oil deposits. Star Jeff Bridges, as well as the big ape's love interest, Jessica Lange, and the rest of the cast all seem to be in on the joke. Special effects artist Rick Baker certainly succeeded in his efforts to give the face of Kong some emotive qualities, and at the time of the film's release, the special effects were state-of-the-art. Studio Canal DE Blu-ray Release date: January 19th, 2017

The Paradine Case BD - Based on a novel by Robert Hichens, The Paradine Case concerns Anna Paradine (Alida Valli), on trial for the murder of her wealthy husband. British barrister Anthony Keane (played by the aggressively American Gregory Peck) takes on the case-and in the process, falls in love with Anna, despite being married himself. Despite his client's protests, Keane summons Anna's lover, unkempt stableman Andre Latour (Louis Jourdan), hoping to prove in court that Latour was the killer. Only after a series of stunning upsets does Keane realize that, for the first time in his career, he has allowed his heart to rule his head. In a typically perverse Hitchcockian development, the film's most unpleasant character, an autocratic, vindictive judge played by Charles Laughton, is one of the few who can see through Anna's facade. Blu-ray Release Date: May 30th, 2017

Fahrenheit 451 BD - An underrated film, perhaps because it is less science fiction than a tale of 'once upon a time'. Where Ray Bradbury's novel posited a strange, terrifyingly mechanised society which has banned books in the interests of material well-being, Truffaut presents a cosy world not so very different from our own, with television a universal father-figure pouring out reassuring messages, and the only element of menace a fire-engine tearing down the road. A bright, gleaming childhood red, the engine is like a reminder of toyhood days; and as Werner's fireman hero goes about his task of destroying literature, his growing awareness of the almost human way in which books curl up and die in the flames gradually assumes the dimensions of a quest for a legendary lost treasure - movingly glimpsed as he slowly and painfully deciphers the title-page of David Copperfield. Koch Media Blu-ray Release Date: September 13th, 2013

The Jacques Rivette Collection BD - In 1975, Jacques Rivette reunited with Out 1 producer Stéphane Tchal Gadjieff with the idea of a four-film cycle. He would create a quartet of interconnected films, each in a different genre. One was to be a love story, another a Western, and there was to be a fantastical thriller and a musical comedy starring Anna Karina and Jean Marais too. Ill health intervened, and only two of the films were completed. Duelle (une quarantine) sees Rivette in fantasy territory, cross-pollinating Val Lewton, Jean Cocteau and film noir as the Queen of the Sun (Bulle Ogier) and the Queen of the Night (Juliet Berto) search for a magical diamond in present day. Its parallel film, Noroît (une vengeance), is a pirate tale and a loose adaptation of The Revenger's Tragedy starring Geraldine Chaplin (Nashville, Cría cuervos). A third film began production Marie et Julien starring Albert Finney and Leslie Caron but Rivette succumbed to nervous exhaustion and shooting was abandoned. When he did return to filmmaking, Rivette borrowed some of the elements of Duelle and Noroît and came up with Merry-Go-Round. Joe Dallesandro (Flesh for Frankenstein) and Maria Schneider (Last Tango in Paris, The Passenger) are summoned to Paris, which leads to one of the most surreal and mysterious tales in a career that was dominated by surrealism and mystery. Arrow US Blu-ray Release Date: May 23rd, 2016

The Mist BD - The Mist is what a horror film should be - dark, tense, and punctuated by just enough gore to keep the viewer's flinch reflex intact. In fact, that movie's ending is so uncompromising that one must assume director Frank Darabont had final cut so the studio couldn't interfere. (It's worth noting that the ending is not the same as that of Stephen King's novella, but I won't mention how it has changed.) Darabont has fashioned a tense motion pictures that's ultimately more about paranoia, religious fanaticism, and the price of hopelessness than it is about monsters. But the creatures are present and accounted for, lurking in the white-out that is the mist. Blu-ray Release Date: September 16th, 2008

Er Woo Dong: The Entertainer - Eoudong is one of the most famous erotic dramas in Korean cinema history, and lead actress Lee Bo Hee took home the Best Actress award at the Korean Film Awards for her role as the eponymous heroine. During the Chosun dynasty, the strict laws of Confucianism permeated an already male-dominant society. Eo Wu-Dong was born into a respectful, aristocratic family, but when she falls in love with a man of obscure birth, society tears them apart. DVD Release Date: January 19th, 2006

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