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Faust - In collaboration
with the screenwriter Hans Kyser, Murnau fused Faust's script
from German folk legend and the works of Goethe, Gounod, and
Marlowe (particularly using the latter's tone). Faust's tale is
a classic one of a man who sells his soul to the devil. In an
attempt to gain control of the Earth, Mephisto (Emil Jannings)
wagers an angel (Werner Fuetterer) that he can corrupt the soul
of the elderly professor Faust (Gosta Ekman). As the Horsemen of
the Apocalypse ride demonically through the sky, Mephisto towers
over Faust's hometown unleashing a plague that spreads amongst
its inhabitants. Faust, unable to find a cure for the citizens
who are dropping dead around him, renounces both God and science
invoking the aid of Satan through a mysterious book that he
chances across. Kino DVD Release Date: March 17th, 2009
Tartuffe - Unjustly
neglected for decades, perhaps because of its low-key nature
compared with Murnau's more grand masterpieces, this delightful
curiosity is more than a mere trifle. Tartuffe affirms Murnau as
a master of multifarious cinematic disciplines: from the
set-based dreams of Faust and Sunrise, to the naturalist
landscapes of Nosferatu, City Girl, and Tabu. In Tartuffe we
find an intimate Murnau, relying on close-ups and the
performances of his actors to create magic. Kino DVD Release
Date: March 17th, 2009
Fletch
BR
- Chevy Chase plays Irwin Fletcher, an investigative journalist
based in Los Angeles. He's been researching drug dealing in the
Venice area when he is approached by Alan Stanwyck (Tim
Matheson) who contracts Fletch to kill him a week from now.
Because Fletch has been disguised as a homeless beachcomber,
Stanwyck assumes he has nothing or no one to live for and would
be just the fellow to put him out of his misery and so avoid a
painful death from some degenerative disease.
Blu-ray
Release date: June 2nd, 2009
Miracle
BR
- Nineteen seventy-nine wasn't a good year for the United
States. In fact, the country was in such a severe state of
political and economic turmoil that inflation was at an all-time
high, and employment an all-time low. Between the gas shortage,
the threat of nuclear weapons, the Iranian hostage crisis, and
the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, America was hit badly during
the height of the Cold War. Nothing it seemed could shake it
from its sociopolitical slump. That is, until February 22, 1980,
when a group of amateur athletes hit the ice to defeat the
Soviet Union -- the world's greatest reigning hockey team -- and
went on to win the gold medal at the 1980 Winter Olympics in
Lake Placid, NY.
Blu-ray
Release date: June 16th, 2009
Out of Time
BR
- Washington is one of the most likable of actors, which is
essential to this character, preventing us from concluding that
he's getting what he deserves. Mendes makes the ex-wife Alex
into a curiously forgiving character, who feels little rancor
for the straying Matt and apparently still likes him; maybe
there would have been more suspense if she were furious with
him. Saana Latham has a tricky role as Ann -- trickier the
deeper we go into the plot -- and is plausible at many different
speeds, and Dean Cain is convincingly vile as the violent
husband. John Billingsley is Chae, the local medical examiner
who is Matt's sidekick and supplies low-key, goofy support in
some tight situations.
Blu-ray
Release date: June 2nd, 2009
Spy Game
BR
- There are certain expected clichés for the genre, and most of
them are present in Spy Game, which is not necessarily a
bad thing. But we are spared one of the most common – in every
sense of the word. The movie starts with what turns out to be a
botched rescue attempt in a Chinese prison by Brad Pitt's
character, Tom Bishop. (The person Bishop was trying to secure
an early release for is not made known to us for quite some
while.) Bishop is captured and tortured, and a bad outcome is
expected sooner rather than later. His former colleague at the
CIA, Nathan Muir (Redford), learns of this from a contact in
Hong Kong on the day of his retirement from the company. (For
some reason I keep seeing flashes of Joe Turner – the irony was
irresistible.)
Blu-ray
Release date: May 26th, 2009
Gran Torino
BR
- Gran Torino is set in a contemporary Midwestern town where the
neighborhood has become gradually infested (I think that’s the
right word) with aliens, specifically the Hmong – a refugee
people from Southeast Asia. Eastwood, who had promised himself a
few years back that he would retire to the other side of the
camera, got caught up in this story and agreed to direct and to
play its lead character, Walt Kowalski, a man haunted by what he
saw or was part of during the Korean War and has since devolved
into the very essence of the American racist.
Blu-ray
Release date: June 9th, 2009
Une femme mariée - Long
out-of-circulation and unavailable on home video, Jean-Luc
Godard’s 1964 masterpiece Une femme mariée, fragments
d’un film tourné en 1964 en noir et blanc [A Married Woman:
Fragments of a Film Shot in 1964 in Black and White] has, until
now, represented the ostensibly ‘missing’ key work from the
first, zeitgeist-defining phase of JLG’s filmography. The
feature which bridges the gap between Bande à part and
Alphaville, Une femme mariée is, nevertheless, a galaxy, or
gallery, unto itself — a lucid, complex, profoundly funny series
of portraits, etched with Godardian acids, of the wife that
represents either a singular case, or a Masters of Cinema
example, of “a”/”the” married woman, and the men in her orbit.
Koch DVD Release Date: June 2nd, 2009
Primitive London
BR
- Primitive London was a Xerox, by way of those jaunty
"Look at Life" programme fillers, of Gualtiero Jacopetti's 1961
hit, Mondo Cane. Jacopetti travelled the world in quest of
savage sexual rites to capture and expose. The world paid its
respects at the box office. Klinger and Tenser, cinema owners,
skin-flick promoters, spotted a trend. They signed on as
executive producers of this daring new hybrid: part tit-show,
part satire, part tabloid editorial. Primitive London never
strayed far from its Soho roots - keeping the emphasis on that
"prim". Miller produced, wrote and directed. Long (future
director of Adventures of a Plumber's Mate, On the Game and
Naughty) operated the camera.
Blu-ray
Release date: May 25th, 2009
Fatal Attraction
BR
- ''Fatal Attraction,'' which opens today at the
Paramount and other theaters, is a thoroughly conventional
thriller at heart, but its heart is not what will attract
notice. As directed by Mr. Lyne, who also made ''9 1/2 Weeks''
and ''Flashdance,'' it has an ingeniously teasing style that
overrules substance at every turn. Mr. Lyne, who displays a lot
more range this time, takes a brilliantly manipulative approach
to what might have been a humdrum subject and shapes a soap
opera of exceptional power. Most of that power comes directly
from visual imagery, for Mr. Lyne is well versed in making
anything - a person, a room, a pile of dishes in a kitchen sink
- seem tactile, rich and sexy.
Blu-ray
Release date: June 9th, 2009
The Bed Sitting Room
BR
- In 1968, United Artists gave Richard Lester a million-dollar
budget and a free rein, out of which he made what must have been
the most noncommercial film he could imagine. In the aftermath
of World War III (which lasts for 2 minutes and 28 seconds), Sir
Ralph Richardson finds himself mutating into a furnished
apartment, Rita Tushingham gives birth to something or other,
the BBC makes house calls, the British middle class spends its
dying days riding in circles through the remains of the
Underground, and civil defense officers Peter Cook and Dudley
Moore periodically descend from a balloon to exhort the populace
to "Keep moving! Keep moving!" Lester, not too surprisingly,
didn't work again for five years, but this 1969 feature is one
of his best efforts, a remarkably sharp and deadly satire.
Blu-ray
Release date: May 25th, 2009
Paycheck
BR
- The usually vapid Ben Affleck plays Jennings, a computer
genius who hires himself to various companies to figure out ways
to get the jump on the competition. At the end of each
assignment he gets a fat paycheck and a memory wipe – just the
weeks involved in the R&D – hell, that might want to use this
guy again some day. One day, zillionaire Rethrick (Aaron Eckhart)
offers Jennings a chance for a job so huge he can permanently
retire – well, not too permanently, he hopes. It is expected to
take three years of his life inside a high tech compound, but
who cares when you have no soul to begin with! When Jennings
"wakes up" three years later he finds that the cool $92,000,000
he just earned disappears almost before his eyes. Worse yet,
there are guys out there that want to kill him and the feds are
on his trail. What 's up with that?
Blu-ray
Release date: May 19th, 2009
Glory
BR
- Glory is, without question, one of the best movies ever made
about the American Civil War (a.k.a. "The War Between the
States"). The reason isn't just the way in which Kevin Jarre's
script illuminates a frequent oversight of history books, nor is
it the fine acting or epic feel that director Edward Zwick
achieves on a modest budget - although those elements are part
of Glory's effectiveness. Rather, it is the way in which the
filmmakers weave an impressively large historical tapestry
without ever losing sight of the characters that make up the
individual threads. Glory has important things to say, yet it
does so without becoming pedantic.
Blu-ray
Release date: June 2nd, 2009
Monster's Inc.
BR
- But the creature Sulley most resembles is a human, thanks to
John Goodman's soothing baritone and an emotive puss designed by
the whizzes at Emeryville's Pixar. A big guy who slouches a bit
as he schlepps off to his factory job, Sulley could be
somebody's dad or grandpa, albeit one with more back hair than
most.
Blu-ray
Release Date: May 20th, 2009
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