Newsletter - FOR THE WEEK

OF August 26th, 2019

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Hoy! Another stacked week of Blu-ray reviews in this newsletter by Indicator, Kino, Arrow, Studio Canal (UK)... of films by Josef von Sternberg, Nicolas Roeg, Alexander Mackendrick, Derek Jarman, Akio Jissôji, Richard Loncraine, Robert Hamer etc. .Our Calendar has new updates of Blu-rays including by directors Victor Fleming, John Gilling, Anthony Mann, James Ivory, Brian De Palma, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, John Landis, Val Guest, Preston Sturges, Wes Anderson, Richard Franklin, Mick Garris, Danny Boyle, John Frankenheimer, David Lynch, Edgar Wright and more. We also have our Feature Blu-ray and 4K UHD posted for AUGUST Enjoy!!

LISTING PAGES:

Cinema of Japan, Discs of the Year for 2018, The TOP 100 DISCS, Ingmar Bergman's Cinema, HAGSPloitation, BLAXPloitation, OZPloitation, 'WOMEN IN PRISON' CINEMA, CREATURE-FEATURES (on Blu-ray!), PRE-CODE FILMs (on Blu-ray!), SILENT ERA FILMs (on Blu-ray!), HAMMER Studios (on Blu-ray!) The 100 BEST Neo-Noirs (on Blu-ray!), The GREATEST 100 Westerns (on Blu-ray!), Giallo on Blu-ray!, ESSENTIAL NOIR on Blu-ray!, Shopping Guide for Blu-rays at Amazon.FR (France), Shopping Guide for Blu-rays at Amazon.DE (Germany) and our LATEST ARTICLES: Movies From... the End of the World,  The Beauties of Star Trek (TOS)

Feature Blu-ray and 4K UHD chosen for the Month of AUGUST!

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ONE VOICE (not Ellsworth Monkton Toohey): It has never been a better time to be a film fan. This week we have many essentials for digital librarians. Nicolas Roeg's timeless psychological thriller-cum-horror Don't Look Now gets a stellar 4K UHD release from Studio Canal. It looks brilliant and the package offers many new extras including a director commentary. This is definitely a worthy reason to adopt this new format. Indicator have impressively bested Criterion with their Blu-ray set of Marlene Dietrich & Josef von Sternberg at Paramount, 1930-1935 with Morocco, Dishonored, Shanghai Express, Blonde Venus, The Scarlet Empress, and The Devil is a Woman. Only DVDBeaver have compared all Blu-rays and the results are that Indicator's commentaries and slight improvement on the transfer of Morocco and extensively with new supplements, video essay, interviews including four commentaries. We get it all here with these 6 films; some Pre-Code sexuality of Dietrich in provocative roles and a master filmmaker capturing her undeniable allure in unique and exotic settings - one of cinema's most iconic partnerships. Yes, it is the definitive - and you must own it. Derek Jarman's Blue is both mesmerizing and contemplative. I reflect on art and my own mortality. A unsung masterpiece in the director's specified IKB (International Klein Blue) 79 on Kino / Zeitgeist's Blu-ray. From our FB Group - "hauntingly beautiful" and "one of the most poignant' final films ever made." Don't.hesitate.at.all. Ealing comedies never grow old - they only get more amusing. This week we reviewed both Kind Hearts and Coronets and The Man in the White Suit - both with "Genuine Class" himself. Both Kino Blu-rays have commentaries. This is addictive cinema. Arrow - only Arrow - would dare to release Akio Jissoji: The Buddhist Trilogy on Blu-ray. This has This Transient Life, Mandara and Poem plus a bonus Blu-ray of It Was a Faint Dream. It won't sell extensively with images shifting from sex to art while encircling the Japanese New Wave. A keeper for rainy days. What a gloriously fun, and frequently wryly sexy film The Missionary is - it has witty dialogue and a curiously subversive subtext. Finally to see it in the proper aspect ratio and in expressive, film-like Indicator Blu-ray, including two commentaries. Harriet Beecher Stowe's famous novelization of the harsh realities of slavery, Uncle Tom's Cabin spawned many film adaptations and Kino's Blu-ray addresses 4 of them, 1910, 1914, 1927 and 1958 in 2K restorations. Important cinema to revisit.

“There are some things which cannot be learned, though they can be studied. Among them are the laws of art—and the lawlessness of it, as well. Every light has a point where it is brightest and a point toward which it wanders to lose itself completely.” ― Josef von Sternberg

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Shanghai Express BD - Although pre-code (with only a few of the ear markers) very little obvious reference is made to Dietrich's character of ultra-exotic Shanghai Lily being a prostitute... but it is inferred that she has slept with more than her fair share of men. Clive Brook plays a military doctor and her ex-lover yet both remain smitten though excessive pride is the romance hurdle. As far as the film personalities go Brook doesn't carry his end very well, but it would be hard to match the ladies in this as Anne May Wong only needs a couple of close ups to command our hypnotized stares. She has some brief symmetry with Dietrich who, rather than acting, appears to be glancing skyward and posing much of the time - trouble is that she does this better than anyone on the silver screen... ever. Sternberg rightly banking his cinema muse's power avoids any chance of Anna May getting an entrenched foothold. Indicator Blu-ray Release Date: August 26th, 2019

Don't Look Now 4K UHD - Widely acclaimed as one of the greatest horror films ever made, Nicolas Roeg’s masterful Don’t Look Now is based on Daphne Du Maurier’s shattering short story. Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie give career-best performances as John and Laura Baxter, an art restorer and his wife struggling to recover from the trauma of their daughter’s accidental drowning. To assuage their grief, the young British couple travel to wintry Venice, on a working holiday to restore a church. Once there, they get involved with two otherworldly sisters, Heather and Wendy (Hilary Mason and Clelia Matania), one of whom is a blind medium who insists she can get them in touch with their late daughter and warns them of danger. 4K Ultra HD Release Date: July 29th, 2016

The Missionary BD - Michael Palin wrote and stars in this comedy as The Reverend Charles Fortescue, an unassuming missionary called back to England after spending ten years in Africa teaching children in a native village. Upon arriving in London, he finds that his new assignment is to take charge of a slum mission for prostitutes. He obtains money for the running of the mission from a wealthy woman, Lady Ames (Maggie Smith), whom he meets on the boat sailing to England from Africa. Lady Ames guarantees Fortescue the money on the condition that he take it upon himself to add a little spice to her dormant sex life. Blu-ray Release Date: August 26th, 2019

The Scarlet Empress BD - Filmmaker-svengali Josef von Sternberg escalates his obsession with screen legend Marlene Dietrich in this lavish depiction of sex and deceit in the 18th-century Russian court. A self-proclaimed “relentless excursion into style,” the pair’s sixth collaboration follows the exploits of Princess Sophia (Dietrich) as she evolves from trembling innocent to cunning sexual libertine Catherine the Great. With operatic melodrama, flamboyant visuals, and a cast of thousands, this ornate spectacle represents the apex of cinematic pageantry by Hollywood’s master of artifice. Indicator Blu-ray Release Date: August 26th, 2019

Kind Hearts and Coronets BD - Director Robert Hamer’s fiendishly funny Kind Hearts and Coronets stands as one of Ealing Studios’ greatest triumphs, and one of the most wickedly black comedies ever made. Dennis Price is sublime as an embittered young commoner determined to avenge his mother’s unjust disinheritance by ascending to the dukedom. Unfortunately, eight family members—all played by the incomparable Alec Guinness—must be eliminated before he can do so. Kino Blu-ray Release Date: September 3rd, 2019

Morocco BD - Von Sternberg's first Hollywood picture, and his second collaboration with Dietrich. Dietrich vamps it up again as the mysterious Amy Jolly who runs away from her past with a one-way ticket to Morocco. Menjou is the poor sap around whom she runs rings, and Cooper gives a subtle performance as the Foreign Legionnaire she really loves. OK, so the plot is pure melodrama, but it's Dietrich the eye is drawn to. She sizzles with a heat and passion that completely upstage just about everyone and everything else. Who could forget the sight of Marlene as the nightclub singer Amy, clad in a tuxedo, planting a kiss on the lips of another woman? Stuffed to the gills with wonderfully silly melodrama, smoky bars and passionate embraces, it's a great film and a fine example of the magic woven by the extraordinary partnerships of Sternberg-Dietrich and Dietrich-Cooper. Indicator Blu-ray Release Date: August 26th, 2019

The Man in the White Suit BD - Alec Guinness has one of his finest comic roles in this Ealing satirical comedy about a much patronized amateur scientist whose latest invention creates an uproar in the British textile industry. In the British manufacturing country of Northern England, factory owner Michael Corland (Michael Gough) is showing competitor Alan Bimley (Cecil Parker) around his plant, hoping to borrow some money and marry off his daughter Daphne (Joan Greenwood). They come upon a curious contraption that turns out to be an experiment by employee Sidney Stratton (Alec Guinness). Being a lower class worker, Sidney is summarily fired from his job. Blu-ray Release Date: September 3rd, 2019

Uncle Tom's Cabin BD - An earnest attempt to depict the harsh realities of slavery, Harry Pollard’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was—at an advertised cost of $2 million—of the most extravagant epics of its time. Margarita Fisher stars as Eliza, a slave who flees a Kentucky plantation after her son and a dignified father figure, Uncle Tom (James Lowe), are sold to a rival landowner. Her Dickensian quest eventually places her in the backwater kingdom of the sadistic Simon Legree (George Siegmann). But the film’s most memorable sequence is Eliza’s flight to freedom across a treacherous ice floe (a staple of the many stage productions, which D.W. Griffith shamelessly appropriated for his 1920 film Way Down East). Blu-ray Release Date: August 20th, 2019

Blue BD - Blue, Derek Jarman's final film, was made as he was dying of AIDS and blind, his vision hijacked by constant blue light. For its entire duration, the screen is filled with the color blue and nothing more, while Jarman, with voice contributions from frequent collaborators Tilda Swinton, John Quentin, and Nigel Terry, weaves a poetic, angry, wistful, and sometimes humorous account of his illness and impending mortality. He speaks of having become a "walking laboratory," taking up to thirty pills a day, of the chore of hospital waiting rooms, of the brusque indifference of medical personnel, of the hypocrisy of charity, and of the color blue. Jarman's voice is commanding. This is not an informal affair. He often speaks in verse, augmented with music and sound by Jarman's regular composer Simon Fisher-Turner, as well as Brian Eno, Coil, Momus, The King of Luxembourg, and others, forming an atmospheric wall of sound that is the film's imagery and is constructed in a highly cinematic way, with abrupt shifts in texture and tone. Blu-ray Release Date: August 27th, 2019

The Devil is a Woman BD - Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich went out with a bang in their final film together, The Devil Is a Woman, a surreal tale of erotic passion and danger set amid the tumult of carnival in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Spain. Through a series of flashbacks, Captain Costelar (Lionel Atwill) recounts to the young Antonio Galvan (Cesar Romero) the story of his harrowing affair with the notorious seductress Concha Perez (Dietrich), warning his listener to gird himself against her charms. Despite his counsel, Galvan falls under Concha’s spell, leading to a violent denouement. Ever the ornate visual stylist, von Sternberg evokes Spanish culture with a touch of the luridly fantastic, further elevated by Travis Banton’s opulent costume design and award-winning cinematography by von Sternberg himself. Indicator Blu-ray Release Date: August 26th, 2019

Dishonored BD - Strange figures emerge from the rubble of the Austrian Empire': among them X-27 (Dietrich) and H-14 (McLaglen), military spies and best-loving enemies. Sternberg's absurd espionage melodrama is just one more peg on which to hang his familiar, outrageous pictorial stylistics and to extend his fetishisation of Marlene - yet the result is amazing. Beyond improbability lies another of Sternberg's systematic examinations of the feminine mystique, and the tragedy of a woman sacrificed on the altar of her sexualty. Right on the surface lies the inevitable patina of telling innuendo; in one deliciously transparent scene, Marlene is betrayed by her own pussy(cat), which eventually lands up safe in the arms of the church as Marlene is shot for her sins. Indicator Blu-ray Release Date: August 26th, 2019

Blonde Venus BD - Josef von Sternberg returned Marlene Dietrich to the stage in Blonde Venus, both a glittering spectacle and a sweeping melodrama about motherly devotion. Unfolding episodically, the film tells the story of Helen (Dietrich), once a German chanteuse, now an American housewife, who resurrects her stage career after her husband (Herbert Marshall) falls ill; she then becomes the mistress of a millionaire (Cary Grant), in a slide from loving martyr to dishonored woman. Despite production difficulties courtesy of the Hays Office, the director’s baroque visual style shines, as do one of the most memorable musical numbers in all of cinema and a parade of visionary costumes by von Sternberg and Dietrich’s longtime collaborator Travis Banton. Indicator Blu-ray Release Date: August 26th, 2019

Akio Jissoji: The Buddhist Trilogy BD - Akio Jissôji created a rich and diverse body of work during his five decades in Japan's film and television industries. For some, he is best-known for his science-fiction: the 1960s TV series Ultraman and 1998 s box-office success Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis. For others, it is his 1990s adaptations of horror and mystery novelist Edogawa Rampo, such as Watcher in the Attic and Murder on D Street. And then there are his New Wave films for the Art Theatre Guild, three of which This Transient Life, Mandara and Poem, forming The Buddhist Trilogy are collected here. Blu-ray Release Date: August 19th, 2019
 

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