Newsletter - FOR THE WEEK OF June 8th, 2009

This Week's Highlights

DVDBeaver has joined Twitter! Sign up for our updates!

2 More, addictive, Blogs added to the toolbar!

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

Gary at 2ze dot com

- Blu-rays from only £8.98 at Amazon UK HERE

• 36% OFF CRITERION FAVORITES HERE

• SALE STILL ON FOR SOME CRITERIONs at AMAZON (Blu, Pre-order and others): • El Norte [Blu-ray] (37% OFF!), The 400 Blows [Blu-ray] (45% OFF!), The Last Emperor [Blu-ray] (37% OFF!), The Man Who Fell to Earth [Blu-ray] (37% OFF!), Ace in the Hole (37% OFF!), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (35% OFF!), Last Year at Marienbad [Blu-ray] (32% OFF!), Wages of Fear [Blu-ray] (32% OFF!), The Seventh Seal [Blu-ray] (32% OFF!), Drunken Angel (32% OFF!), Alexander Korda's Private Lives (25% OFF!), The Third Man [Blu-ray] (37% OFF!), Chungking Express [Blu-ray] (37% OFF!), The Last Metro [Blu-ray] (32% OFF!), Bottle Rocket [Blu-ray] (35% OFF!), Empire of Passion (27% OFF!)

• WORLD CINEMA SALE STILL ON - UP To 70% OFF HERE

• SALES: US Blu-ray up to 53% OFF        UK Blu-ray 2 for 3 SALE       Amazon France Blu-ray SALE (BUY 1 get 1 FREE!)

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

Lost Season Two BR - The remarkable thing about Lost is how it takes its time to reveal itself and its characters. (The "Others," who share the island with the Survivors, don't even reveal themselves until the end of the second season.) On the one hand, we get to know our adventurers only in fragments that, save a familiar music cue, appear without warning throughout every episode. These fragments might take us and them back to the day before or years before the crash. We see what shaped their character and, in many cases, how they rubbed up against each other, often unremarkably, before the flight. Blu-ray  Release Date: June 16th, 2009

Lost Season One BR - For those three or four of you who have been lost in television's wasteland for the past five years rather than lost on the island, here's the deal: Oceanic Airlines flight 815 has just come apart in the sky above a remote and, as we come to find out, uncharted island in the South Pacific. A few dozen survivors try to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives as they hold out hope for a rescue. A few days into their stay (which, by the way, is weeks, not years, by the end of the fourth season), they learn two very important things: they are not alone on this island, and the island itself has strange, even miraculous properties that affect both their health and their perception of time. Blu-ray  Release Date: June 16th, 2009

Ghostbusters BR - University parapsychologists Dr. Peter Venkman (Murray), Dr. Raymond Stanz (Aykroyd) and Dr. Egon Spengler (Ramis) lose a research grant when their experiment methodology is proven to be bogus. The team decides to go into business for themselves and open ‘Ghostbusters,’ a ghost removal service. After struggling to get on their feet, they are summoned to investigate the strange happenings in Dana Barrett’s (Weaver) Central Park West apartment. What they discover is that all Manhattan is being besieged by ghosts and other worldly demons through a portal in her building. Blu-ray  Release Date: June 16th, 2009

The King and I (Korean Drama) - "Ambition" may be the operant word for this extraordinary series, since it clearly motivated the writer and producer as well as several of its principal characters. The King and I, which runs well over 70 hours, is a fictionalized dramatization not only of a great many characters and events across the better part of a century, but the political struggles and cultural practices of a time now remote. Moreover, the most important characters in the series are a class of people never before, to my knowledge, given pride of place in a popular well-funded television program from any country.

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb BR - The destruction of mankind by the H-Bomb and a so-called "Doomsday Machine" scarcely seems a likely subject for comedy yet producer-director Stanley Kubrick has fashioned a fantastically satirical picture with many chuckles and a goodly amount of suspense from his zany picturization of Peter George's book, "Red Alert." Once again, Peter Sellers demonstrates his versatility and fine comedy sense with three widely varied portrayals, a mild-mannered British liaison officer, the calm, serious President of the U.S. and the heavily accented crippled German scientist, who gives the film its title (certainly the longest ever). Sellers' name, plus the title and rave magazine reviews, will attract the mature class patrons, especially in the key cities, but the picture's weird theme and the sex angle, briefly introduced by the bikini-clad Tracy Reed as an Air Force general's amorous secretary, must be heavily exploited. Blu-ray Release Date: June 16th, 2009

Fracture BR - Even Mr. Hopkins’s most familiar tricks — a blank face capped by a hint of a shiver-inducing smile — work to the story’s advantage. In a less capable film those gently upturned lips could easily repulse because they would invoke unfavorable comparisons with Hannibal Lecter; here, though, they simply remind you that memorable screen villainy can be as much a matter of impeccable manners as evil designs. Blu-ray Release Date: June 16th, 2009

Body and Soul - The anti-capitalist message seems to have offended some; Garfield, director Rossen and scriptwriter Polonsky were rounded up by the Un-American Activities committee (and Polonsky and Rossen were eventually blacklisted). This is tight, hard-hitting entertainment, which inspired Rocky and Raging Bull.

Shallow Grave BR - Three unattached roommates share a flat and are in search of a 4th. They find a seemingly good fit, but without giving away too many spoilers - his positional (and past) function create huge conflicts. The once great friends now nervously border on interactions of paranoia, suspicion and greed. It certainly could be considered a modern film noir - with basically good people transformed to behave illegally... all for money. (Fox is a great Femme Fatale in the offing). Blu-ray Release Date: June 1st, 2009

The Seventh Seal BR - The late twentieth century’s defining anxiety – nuclear catastrophe –inspired film masterworks in a variety of genres, from noir (‘Kiss Me Deadly’) to essay (‘Hiroshima, Mon Amour’), faux documentary (‘The War Game’) to horror (‘Godzilla’). But it found possibly its greatest cinematic expression in Ingmar Bergman’s doom-laden medieval allegory, a film that re-imagines a previous period of existential angst and primal fear: the plague-ridden thirteenth century. ‘The Seventh Seal’ has the courage to give fear a face. You could say of its most famous image – returned crusader Max von Sydow’s desperate chess game with Death (Bengt Ekerot), shot in superb high-Gothic relief by cinematographer Gunnar Fischer in homage to an image Bergman remembered from a childhood church visit – that it has lost none of its power to impress. Criterion Blu-ray and DVD Released: June 16th, 2009

My Dinner With Andre - In Louis Malle’s captivating and philosophical My Dinner with André, actor and playwright Wallace Shawn sits down with friend and theater director André Gregory at an Upper West Side restaurant, and the two proceed into an alternately whimsical and despairing confessional on love, death, money, and all the superstition in between. Playing variations on their own New York–honed personas, Shawn and Gregory, who also wrote the screenplay, dive in with introspective, intellectual gusto, and Malle captures it all with a delicate, artful detachment. A fascinating freeze-frame of cosmopolitan culture, My Dinner with André remains a unique work in cinema history. DVD Release Date: June 23rd, 2009

Last Year at Marienbad - Not just a defining work of the French New Wave but one of the great, lasting mysteries of modern art, Alain Resnais’ epochal Last Year at Marienbad (L’année dernière à Marienbad) has been puzzling appreciative viewers for decades. Written by radical master of the New Novel Alain Robbe-Grillet, this surreal fever dream, or nightmare, gorgeously fuses the past with the present in telling its ambiguous tale of a man and a woman (Giorgio Albertazzi and Delphine Seyrig) who may or may not have met a year ago, perhaps at the very same cathedral-like, mirror-filled château they now find themselves wandering. Unforgettable in both its confounding details (gilded ceilings, diabolical parlor games, a loaded gun) and haunting scope, Resnais’ investigation into the nature of memory is disturbing, romantic, and maybe even a ghost story. DVD Release Date: June 23rd, 2009

The International BR - The director is Tom Tykwer ("Run, Lola, Run"). Here he's concerned not merely with thriller action but with an actual subject: the dangers of a banking system that operates offshore no matter where your shoreline is. We're gradually getting it into our heads that in the long run, your nuclear capability may not be as important as your bank balance. Banks are not lending much money these days, but if you want to buy some warheads, they might take a meeting. Blu-ray Release date: June 9th, 2009

Magick Lantern Cycle BR - Renowned as the author of the scandalous best-selling book Hollywood Babylon, Kenneth Anger is a legend in this own time. The mythology that has grown around him has many sources, from his involvement with the occult, astrology and the pop world of Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull and Jimmy Page, to the announcement of his own death in the pages of the Village Voice, and the destruction, loss and banning of his films. At the heart of all this mythology is a filmmaker of prodigious talent, whose skill and imagination create films of great visual force, influencing filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, David Lynch and RW Fassbinder. Blu-ray Release date: May 25th, 2009

Daisies - Vera Chytilová's classic of surrealist cinema comes to Second Run DVD in an all-new digital transfer with improved picture and sound. A satirical, wild and irreverent story of teenage rebellion. Two young women rebel against a degenerate and oppressive society, attacking symbols of wealth and bourgeois culture. A riotous, punk-rock poem of a film that is both hilarious and mind-warpingly innovative, Daisies was banned in native Czechoslovakia and director Vera Chytilová was forbidden to work until 1975. Special features include; New filmed interview with director Vera Chytilová; Booklet essays; All new director-approved digital transfer from original negative materials with restored picture and sound. DVD Release Date: June 1st, 2009

Week of June 15th, 2009