Newsletter - FOR THE WEEK OF August 10th, 2009

This Week's Highlights

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

Gary at 2ze dot com

There is a HUGE SALE going on at Amazon and we've identified over 120 titles that YOU may be interested in - SEE THE ENTIRE LIST HERE

TOP 10 DVDs ORDERED VIA THIS SALE BY OUR COMMUNITY SO FAR:

M - 2 Disc Special Edition (Fritz Lang, 1931) 60% OFF!

Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica, 1949) 60% OFF!

L'Eclisse (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962) 60% OFF!

L'Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1961) 60% OFF!

This Sporting Life (Lindsay Anderson, 1963) 60% OFF!

Pandora's Box (Georg Wilhelm Pabst, 1929) 60% OFF!

8 1/2 (Federico Fellini, 1963) 60% OFF!

The Lady Vanishes (Alfred Hitchcock, 1938) 60% OFF!

The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse (Fritz Lang, 1933) 60% OFF!

Jean Renoir 3-Disc Collector's Edition (Whirlpool of Fate / Nana / Charleston Parade / La Marseillaise / The Doctor's Horrible Experiment / The Elusive Corporal) $15.49

TOP 10 Blu-rays ORDERED SO FAR:

The Third Man [Blu-ray] (Carol Reed, 1949) 60% OFF!

Last Year at Marienbad [Blu-ray] (Alain Resnais, 1961) 35% OFF!

How the West Was Won (Blu-ray Book) (1962) 57% OFF!

The Searchers [Blu-ray] (John Ford, 1956) $9.49

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button [Blu-ray] (David Fincher, 2008) $13.99

The Seventh Seal [Blu-ray] (Ingmar Bergman, 1957) 37% OFF!

Repulsion [Blu-ray] (Roman Polanski, 1965) 40% OFF!

Chungking Express [Blu-ray] (Wong Kar-Wai, 1994) 37% OFF!

2001 - A Space Odyssey [Blu-ray] (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) $10.49
The 400 Blows [Blu-ray] (François Truffaut, 1959) 37% OFF!

NOTE: The above sale prices are subject to increase without notice - it seems based on demand. They were accurate at the time I wrote them - but, guaranteed, they WILL increase! If you are interested order and lock-in the savings now...

Regular sales continue:

• $14.99 Blu-ray SALE - 96 titles to choose HERE

• Amazon UK Blu-ray SUMMER SALE HERE

• Use Amazon code SONYPIC5 for $5 off Dr. Strangelove on Blu-ray

• Use Amazon code GHOSTBLU for $5 off Ghostbusters on Blu-ray

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

• 36% OFF CRITERION FAVORITES HERE

• 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!)

The Last Days of Disco - The Last Days of Disco is a clever, comic return to the nighttime party scene in early eighties Manhattan from director Whit Stillman (Metropolitan). At the center of the film’s roundelay of revelers are the icy Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale) and the demure Alice (Chloë Sevigny), by day toiling as publishing house assistants and by night looking for romance and entertainment at a premier, Studio 54–like club. The Last Days of Disco is an affectionate yet unsentimental look at the end of an era, brimming with Stillman’s trademark dry humor. DVD Release Date: August 25th, 2009

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles BR - Through the 1980s, along with the rise of the arcade video game and home versions like the Atari 2600, kids would get their kicks from comic books, toys and made for TV cartoon series. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, originally designed as a parody of superhero comics, was to become a marketing phenomenon, taking hold of preteen boys by storm. It was only a matter of time before it would find its way onto the big screen. Blu-ray Release date: August 11th, 2009

Surveillance BR - When FBI agents Elizabeth Anderson (Julia Ormond) and Sam Hallaway (Bill Pullman) arrive at a local police station to investigate a series of gruesome murders, there are three witnesses with three different stories of the roadside rampage. However, as the agents begin to expose the fragile little details each witness conceals so carefully with a well practiced lie, they soon discover that uncovering the truth can come at a very big cost. Blu-ray Release date: August 18th, 2009

The Housemaid - Widely considered one of the best Korean films of all time, the 1960 black and white classic The Housemaid is finally available on DVD! Known for his psychodramas and sexual horror films, Kim Ki Young made The Housemaid in the early years of a career that would see him continuously pushing the boundaries of cinema. This domestic noir about sexual obsession and a family's dreadful unraveling shocks and thrills even half a century later. The Housemaid stars Lee Eun Shim as the eponymous femme fatale, and Kim Jin Kyu and Ju Jeung Ryu - two of the greatest stars from the Golden Age of Korean Cinema - as the married couple who self-destruct under her will. Acclaimed actor Ahn Sung Ki, only eight years old at the time, also appears in the film. Great efforts were taken by the Korean Film Archive and World Cinema Foundation to digitally restore and remaster The Housemaid, unveiling this great masterpiece to film fans worldwide. DVD Release Date: July 29th, 2009

The Five Deadly Venoms - This movie was a moderate hit in Hong Kong and prompted Chang Cheh to start a series of films with the same actors, though no sequel to this film ever materialized. Unfortunately, after the great Crippled Avengers (1978), the team slowly lost their place at the box-office to the emergence of kung fu comedy. In no uncertain terms the failure of these films eroded Chang Cheh’s creditability and led to his separation from the Shaw Brothers Studios just a few years later. But the influence of the film was further reaching than anyone could have known. For many western viewers, Five Venoms (or Five Deadly Venoms as it was known abroad) is THE Shaw Brothers film. It was a hit in every form of release in the U.S. and influenced everything from poster art to commercials in the west. Outside of 36th Chamber of Shaolin(1978), it is perhaps the most well known and unusual kung fu film Shaw Brothers Studios ever produced. DVD Release Date: August 18th, 2009

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles - A singular work in film history, Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles meticulously details, with a sense of impending doom, the daily routine of a middle-aged widow—whose chores include making the beds, cooking dinner for her son, and turning the occasional trick. In its enormous spareness, Akerman’s film seems simple, but it encompasses an entire world. Whether seen as an exacting character study or one of cinema’s most hypnotic and complete depictions of space and time, Jeanne Dielman is an astonishing, compelling movie experiment, one that has been analyzed and argued over for decades. DVD Release Date: August 25th, 2009

The State I Am In - Along with his subsequent made-for-TV movie Something To Remind Me (Toter Mann, 2002), The State I’m In confirms Petzold* as one of the new decade’s most strikingly intelligent film-makers. An unclassifiable combination of teen romance, coming-of-age drama, and paranoid political thriller, the film revolves around 15-year-old Jeanne (Julia Hummer). Like many girls her age, she’s growing increasingly resentful of parental demands: who she should see, where she should go, how she should dress, etc. But for the parents – Hans (Richy Muller) and Clara (Barbara Auer) – Jeanne’s blossoming independence poses particularly pressing problems: the pair are renegades, permanently on the run from the police for unspecified reasons. DVD Release Date: July 28th, 2009

Monster BR - The true-life story of Aileen Wuornos, a prostitute executed in 2002 in Florida after being convicted of murdering six men. While Wuornos confessed to the six murders, including a policeman, she claimed to have killed only in self-defense, resisting violent assaults while working as a prostitute. In 1989-90, a love story unfolds in the midst of the horrors and pathologies of two misfits: Wuornos (Charlize Theron), a drifter prostitute and Selby Wall (Christina Ricci), sent by her parents to live with an aunt in Florida in order to "cure her homosexuality". Nearing suicidal despair, Aileen wanders into a bar, where she meets Selby and falls in love. To keep her and Selby's relationship alive, she continues hooking, only to fuel an increasingly escalating deadly rage, a fury vented with a lurid string of killings and the media's sordid designation of her as the first female serial killer--a monster. Blu-ray Release Date: September 1st, 2009

Dexter Season Three BR - As we learned in Season One, by day Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall) is a blood-spatter forensic analyst for the Miami Metro Police. By night, he "takes out the trash" as he refers to his decade long obsession as a vigilante serial killer. Dexter's fascination with the processes of death and killing began early but he's found a way to live with his peculiarities. In one of Dexter's many flashbacks we find him in a close-up discussion with his adoptive father, a straight-arrow Miami cop (James Remar), about the morality of killing domestic animals and how such a propensity could lead to targets higher up the food chain if not checked. Blu-ray Release date: August 18, 2009

Fast & Furious BR - The latest in the Fast & Furious franchise picks up where the first two left off. The director is Justin Lin, who helmed F&F3 Tokyo Drift though, chronologically, the new movie precedes the third – not that it matters very much. You'll remember that undercover cop Brian O'Connor (Paul Walker, still pretty with or without the light beard) lets Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel, possibly stiffer, but still determined) escape at the end of the first movie. While O'Connor heads for Miami in F&F2 to work out his differences with the agency, Dom (offstage) heads for Central America, where we catch up with him at the start of the new movie. Blu-ray Release date: July 28th, 2008

Nikkatsu Noir - Eclipse Series 17 - From the late 1950s through the sixties, wild, idiosyncratic crime movies were the brutal and boisterous business of Nikkatsu, the oldest film studio in Japan. In an effort to attract youthful audiences growing increasingly accustomed to American and French big-screen imports, Nikkatsu began producing action potboilers (mukokuseki akushun, or “borderless action”) that incorporated elements of the western, comedy, gangster, and teen-rebel genres. This bruised and bloody collection represents a standout cross section of what Nikkatsu had to offer, from such prominent, stylistically daring directors as Seijun Suzuki, Toshio Masuda, and Takashi Nomura. DVD Release Date: August 25th, 2009

Blue Thunder BR - Blue Thunder was Badham’s best action film. Although Dan O’Bannon was vocally unhappy at the way Badham dumbed down his script. The more serious elements – such as O’Bannon originally intending Murphy to be a Vietnam veteran – and the political ramifications have been junked in favor of bulleting action. But that said, Badham drives the film with a solid and gritty punch. The scenes with the helicopter demonstrating its capabilities and in action are well-achieved and the nighttime sequences with the copter silently spying on nude aerobicists and office windows take on a shadowy excitement. Blu-ray Release date: August 11th, 2009

The Class BR - There are times when fists fly as fast as the arguments and you want to duck. Over the course of a year with this teacher, flawed and conflicted in ways that Hollywood would run from, The Class creates a frenzy of bad behavior, divided loyalties and hard won compromise — a parallel universe that looks very much like our own. The premise that all life is high school has never seemed as scarily true and oddly hopeful then it does here. Fierce, funny and moving, The Class graduates with honors. It's unmissable. Absentees will be punished. Blu-ray Release date: August 11th, 2009

Trapped - When psychotic preacher's son Chatwill (Henry Silva) he catches much younger his wife (Danone Camden) in bed with another man, he accuses the man of rape and gets the approval of the town elders to run the man out of town. Four university students on a hiking trip unfortunately witness the Chatwill's brutal murder of the man and are captured by the other men implicated in the crime. When the elders discover that Chatwill has in fact killed the man (and then kills one of their own when he tries to help the students), they aide Roger (Nicholas Campbell) in his attempt to rescue his friends from Chatwill and his sadistic buddies who plan to get rid of the witnesses. DVD Release Date: August 4th, 2009

The Last Starfighter BR - Once called "One of the best B-movie ever made" The Last Starfighter lives up to its calling even 25 years later. That's one of the nice things about B-movies – production values are not so high that we go crazy picking at this or that shortcoming. In the commentary, Director Nick Castle and Production Designer Ron Cobb speak at length about this movie being on the cutting age of cinema digital effects. These effects look primitive now. So too is the Atari vintage video game that our hero plays outside his trailer. We can but smile. Blu-ray Release date: August 18th, 2009

Henry Poole is Here BR - "Henry Poole Is Here" achieves something that is uncommonly difficult. It is a spiritual movie with the power to emotionally touch believers, agnostics and atheists -- in that descending order, I suspect. It doesn't say that religious beliefs are real. It simply says that belief is real. And it's a warm-hearted love story. Blu-ray Release Date: January 20th, 2009

9 Songs BR - What is a relationship, what is love between two people, and why isn’t it allowed to show to people in love having sex? Those were the questions which lead Michael Winterbottom to “9 Songs”, a love story told from a sexual point of view by two people making love. Blu-ray Release Date: July 20th, 2009

Devil in the Flesh - Bearing no particular relation to any literary or cinematic work of the same title, this erotic drama by Marco Bellocchio uses sexual expression to work out a character's hang-ups, problems, and personality. Andrea (Federico Ptizalis) is in his last year of high school when he meets Giulia (Maruschka Detmers). Her father was killed by terrorists, yet Giulia is engaged to marry a former terrorist who is released from prison after he names names. After Andrea and Giulia meet, they have some torrid sexual encounters, though Giulia continues her engagement to the ex-terrorist because her wealthy family opposes any liaison with the lower-class Andrea. DVD Release Date: August 11th, 2009

Goodfellas BR - When Martin Scorsese, one of the world's most skillful and respected directors, reunited with two-time Oscar-winner Robert De Niro in GoodFellas, the result was one of the most powerful films of the year. Based on the true-life best seller Wiseguy by Nicholas Pileggi and backed by a dynamic pop/rock oldies soundtrack, critics and filmgoers alike declared GoodFellas great. It was named 1990's best film by the New York, Los Angeles and National Society of Film Critics. And it earned six Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director. Robert De Niro received wide recognition for his performance as veteran criminal Jimmy "The Gent" Conway. Blu-ray Release Date: January 6th, 2007

Full Metal Jacket BR - An uncompromisingly bleak war film, as cold and distant as they come. Director Stanley Kubrick presents this cinematic tour de force in two parts: The first details the training of a group of Marines at the hands of sadistic gunnery sergeant Hartman (Lee Ermey); the second follows one of the recruits (Matthew Modine) who finds himself in combat at the height of the Tet Offensive. Kubrick's cameras are so fluid and his shots so inventive, the action overwhelms the viewer. Blu-ray Release Date: October 23rd, 2007

Reservoir Dogs BR - Reservoir Dogs grabs you by the throat and digs its claws in deep. From the moment that the unwitting viewer tumbles into the realm of Lawrence Tierney's gang of eight, they are hopelessly trapped there until the final credits roll. As the first outing for actor/director/ writer Quentin Tarantino, this is a triumph, displaying all the marks of a longtime virtuoso of the genre. Blu-ray Release Date: February 7th, 2006

Race to Witch Mountain BR - It's been a few years since Disney closed the door on Witch Mountain. The first movie, Escape to Witch Mountain, was way back in 1975; the sequel, Return from Witch Mountain, followed three years later. Each employed the talents of a number of major actors (Eddie Albert, Ray Milland and Donald Pleasence in the original; Bette Davis and Christopher Lee in the second.) Kim Richards and Ike Eisenmann played the same children in both movies, and are seen in cameos in the new film. Blu-ray Release date: August 4, 2009

The Strangeness - A man and woman sneak up to an abandoned mine at night to blow it open and are picked off - as is oft to happen to pre-credits characters - by an unseen force. After the credits, the mismatched group of miners (geologist, writer, photographer, professional miners, storied guide, and grumpy, suspicious corporate representative who knows more than he lets on and will be most deserving of a gruesome death) venture into the Golden Spike Mine to see if there is enough gold left to re-open. No sooner are all of them inside the mine is the rope cut and a cave in soon follows. DVD Release Date: August 18th, 2009

The Weekend Murders - The atmosphere is ripe for murder at the estate of the recently dead Henry Carter. His heirs are a typically suspicious lot. There's daughter Isabelle (Evelyn Stewart aka Ida Galli, CASE OF THE SCORPION'S TAIL) who abandoned her father and married beneath her station, her husband Anthony (Peter Baldwin, THE GHOST), her disapproving Aunt Gladys (Marisa Fabbri, FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET) and her prank-playing horny son Georgie (Chris Chittel, BEAST IN THE CELLAR), seemingly benevolent cousin Barbara (opera star Anna Moffo), pompous Uncle Lawrence (Quinto Parmeggiani, IDENTIKIT), and wastrel Ted (Giacomo Rossi-Stuart, THE NIGHT EVELYN CAME OUT OF THE GRAVE) who shocks his family with his surprise marriage to Pauline (Beryl Cunningham, SO SWEET SO PERVERSE). DVD Release Date: August 11th, 2009