DVDBeaver Newsletter - October 29th, 2007

Bavarien ches! - Another intense week for the Beav. 14 new reviews with many more 'on deck' for next week. We have 4 multi-film boxsets, a TV serial - and, at 15-1/2 hours, basically the longest narrative film ever made. Plus 8 high definition digital extravaganzas. Fassbinder, Kubrick, Lindsay Anderson...  a new (more difficult) contest, a new article, sales, calendar updates, recommendations... ENJOY?

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NEW ARTICLE:   An Extended Review of O Lucky Man! by Peter Hoskin

CONTEST ACTIVITY:

and you must be subscribed to our Free Weekly Newsletter and email all answer to contest@DVDBeaver.com

Winner of the clip from the week of Oct 22nd was J. Poirier of Québec City (wins a sealed DVD of Criterion's Under the Volcano!) Congrats Jean!

SECOND CONTEST OVER:

HERE Winners who identified the five pairs of screenshots from as many Korean movies on Leonard's review of Alone in Love are:

The Winner of a complete box set of Alone in Love (value over $80) is:
Peter Sattler, Sheboygan, WI
The Runners-Up, who each will receive a DVD of the first 3 episodes, are:
• J. Tse, Peachtree City, GA
• C. Samuelson, Evergreen, CO
• R. Cagle, Fisher, IL
• J. Rolnicki, Brunswick, OH
• C. Tsai, San Jose, CA
• J. Y. Lee, Tujunga, CA
• A. Straus, Harjumaa, ESTONIA

Beaver citing: We are quoted in November edition of The DVD Stack - a monthly periodical.

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Easiest way to catch up is simply read the new Newsletter Archive HERE.

LATEST Additions to the Release Calendar (PRE-ORDER!) I'll be getting (obvious) - Mikio Naruse Collection, Postwar Kurosawa (do some comparing), ditto for 4 x Varda, This Sporting Life, The Naked Prey, 'Breaker' Morant , Marketa Lazarová, and even though its Kino - Lubitsch in Berlin . I'm also very curious about The Golden Door and John Carney's Once. Ohh and finally in region 1, Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It. For hi-def purposes I'll feel obliged to get The Rock [Blu-ray] and Con Air [Blu-ray] and possibly 3:10 to Yuma [Blu-ray]. The rest:

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines [Blu-ray] (James Cameron, 2003) Warner Home Video

Zodiac [HD DVD] (David Fincher,2007) Paramount

12:08 East of Bucharest (Corneliu Porumboiu, 2006) R2 UK Artificial Eye

Private Fears In Public Places (Alain Resnais, 2006) R2 UK Artificial Eye

Postwar Kurosawa (I Live in Fear, The Idiot, No Regrets for our Youth, One Wonderful Sunday and Scandal) - Eclipse/Criterion

The Naked Prey (Cornel Wilde, 1966) Criterion

This Sporting Life (Lindsay Anderson, 1963) Criterion

4 x Varda (Cleo from 5 to 7, Le Bonhuer, Vagabond and, La Pointe Courte) Criterion

3:10 to Yuma [Blu-ray] (James Mangold, 2007) Lions Gate Home Entertainment

John Frankenheimer Gift Set (The Young Savages (1961), The Manchurian Candidate (1962), The Train (1964) and Ronin.(1998)) - MGM

Hello, Dolly! (Gene Kelly, 1969) - 20th Century Fox

Kaspar Hauser (Peter Sehr, 1993) Kino

Man on Fire [Blu-ray] (Tony Scott, 2004) Fox Home Entertainment

Shoot 'Em Up (Michael Davis, 2007) New Line Home Video

Shoot 'Em Up [Blu-ray] (Michael Davis, 2007) New Line Home Video

Mikio Naruse Collection (When A Woman Ascends the Stairs, Floating Clouds, Late Chrysanthemums) R2 UK - BFI Video, 'Breaker' Morant (Bruce Beresford, 1980) Image Entertainment

'Breaker' Morant [Blu-ray] (Bruce Beresford, 1980) Image Entertainment

Marketa Lazarová (Frantisek Vlácil, 1967) R2 UK - Second Run

She's Gotta Have It (Spike Lee, 1986) MGM

In the Heat of the Night - Anniversary Edition (Norman Jewison, 1967) United Artists

The Rock [Blu-ray] (Michael Bay, 1996) Walt Disney Video

Con Air [Blu-ray] (Simon West, 1997) Touchstone / Disney

Cary Grant Collection (Indiscreet, Operation Petticoat, That Touch of Mink, and The Grass Is Greener) - Lions Gate Home Entertainment

Lubitsch in Berlin (The Doll/Ernst Lubitsch in Berlin/The Oyster Princess/I Don't Want to be a Man/Sumurun/Anna Boleyn/The Wildcat) Kino

Atlas (Roger Corman, 1961) IMD Films

Once (John Carney, 2006) 20th Century Fox

The Golden Door (Emanuele Crialese, 2006) Walt Disney Video

New Reviews:.

Good Grief Charlie Brown! - it just never stops:  - Berlin Alexanderplatz is an absolute essential - in one of the two new editions (Criterion or Second Sight). Frontrunner for Feature DVD of the Month surely is 2001: A Space Odyssey HD + BR. O Lucky Man! is another classic that deserves attention - ditto for Eyes Wide Shut HD + BR. Speaking of hi-def; Spider-Man - The High Definition Trilogy BR - I can't say enough about the quality... okay, I can; N'uff said. And how can you not celebrate Barb Stanwyck's 100th birthday... with 6 films (5 fresh to DVD): The Barbara Stanwyck Signature Collection. Bad 'B' films need support too - so we have Icons of Horror - Sam Katzman (super happy fun folks). I tell you I'm broke but happy. Peter Parker can't pay his bills and neither can I.

Trading Places BR - One of the things we enjoy about Trading Paces every time we see it is the opening credits: scenes of 1980s Philadelphia set to the exuberant strains of Mozart. But, why Mozart? And why The Marriage of Figaro Overture? Turns out this is no idle choice, nor one made only for the sake of its energy and sparkle, of which it has plenty. Figaro is all about class struggle, masters and servants, and, not least, changing roles that eventually foil the nobility. Cool, huh...

Casino Royale BR - It should be mentioned quickly, just to get it out of the way, that this Casino Royale has just about nothing to do with the 1967 satire produced by Charles Feldman and starring the very suave and semi-retired David Niven (this was far from his last film) as the very retired "Sir James" and Woody Allen as "Jimmy." But I exaggerate. For two other important characters appear in both films: Le Chiffre and Vesper Lynd, and "M" of course (here, in a kind of sly time warp, played once again by Judi Dench). . . these and the fact that gambling in a major (if fictional) casino figure prominently. The game in every way has been upgraded: Baccarat has been replaced by the high stakes poker of today: Texas Hold'em, and SMERSH is no longer the antagonist, for the villainy here is far uglier and the action more intimate – but then this is true for the new film in comparison to all the Bonds that precede it.

Spider-Man - The High Definition Trilogy BR - Stan Lee (always a cameo in the films) and Steve Dikto (artist) struck gold with their Spider-Man creation decades ago - Lee's idea was to create a "human character", an imperfect geek born to constantly fall short. A weak child, with black-framed glasses, deceased parents, picked on by his classmates, and often unable to find the money for the rent. Seeing this protagonist succeed sparked hope for everyone. This was no undefeatable Superman but an everyman coping with his special powers... and trying to do the right thing. At the same time making the mistakes that you and I might in his position - seduced by his own abilities, desirous of acceptance and love (like us all) but learning the hard way that it doesn't always work out for the best in the end. Peter Parker is the perfect comic book invention - right down from being bit by a genetically mutated spider - to his age, his friends and Joe-job circumstances he lives under. His success become our success... and for that we love him and follow his adventures in crime fighting, family support and seeking love. The three Sony films have barely touched the surface of this icon's depth - another positive as we may have years and years ahead of growth, maturity and battling the forces of evil. Bravo! Blu-ray Boxset Released: October 30th, 2007

Berlin Alexanderplatz - Rainer Werner Fassbinder's controversial, fifteen-hour-plus Berlin Alexanderplatz, based on Alfred Döblin's great modernist novel, was the crowning achievement of a prolific director who, at age thirty-four, had already made forty films. Fassbinder’s immersive epic, restored in 2006 and now available on DVD in this country for the first time, follows the hulking, childlike ex-convict Franz Biberkopf (Günter Lamprecht) as he attempts to "become an honest soul" amid the corrosive urban landscape of Weimar-era Germany. With equal parts cynicism and humanity, Fassbinder details a mammoth portrait of a common man struggling to survive in a viciously uncommon time. Criterion DVD Release Date: November 13th, 2007, Second Sight DVD Release Date: October 22nd, 2007

O Lucky Man! - Made in 1973, as a follow-up to 1968’s If...., O Lucky Man! transposes Voltaire’s Candide to modern Britain as it follows Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell) through the vagaries, hypocrisies and amoralities of contemporary society. The viewer is plunged, along with Mick, headfirst into all of this, and is left reeling by what is a bewildering medley of surrealism, realism, music, self-reference, satire, spy-film, polemic and poetry. Of course, this doesn’t make the reviewer’s job easy. Threads must be grabbed, and synopses eschewed, in the hope that some method or truth will be discovered beneath the madness. What follows is an exercise in thread-grabbing. DVD Release Date: October 23rd, 2007

2001: A Space Odyssey HD + BR - Director Stanley Kubrick's heralded masterpiece '2001: A Space Odyssey' immediately informs the viewers of its grandeur with a realistically derived vision of human evolution. The first segment entitled "The Dawn of Man" documents our ancestors maintaining sustenance through clan support, and food foraging. The story, based on the Arthur C. Clarke novel, naturally includes a strong fictional element proposing a single event that initiated the turning point of the ascension of humankind. Somewhere in the course of our history, a single ancestor came to the realization of his ability to use a 'tool'. Initially it was effective as a weapon in hunting and reacquisition of a watering-hole from neighboring pre-hominids. This unexplainable cognitive step distinctly separates us from every known living organism in the universe that we inhabit. To see it transpire onscreen is one of the great moments of intellectually derived cinema. To simply state that visually it is awe-inspiring is to diminish its importance. What we are seeing is a recreation of the most important event in human history. HD + Blu-ray DVDs Released: October 23rd, 2007

Eyes Wide Shut HD + BR - Most reviews of every Kubrick picture since 2001 have been mired in misapprehensions and underestimations—many of which are corrected years later without apology, one reason he apparently gave up on critics about 30 years ago. This doesn't necessarily mean he was always ahead of his time: one of the best things about Eyes Wide Shut—evident in such artisanal qualities as the old-fashioned sound track, the grainy photography, and the exquisite color balances ...—is that it isn't a film of the 90s in most respects but something closer to what movies at their best used to be. ... This is personal filmmaking as well as dream poetry of the kind most movie commerce has ground underfoot, and if a better studio release comes along this year I'll be flabbergasted. A Masterpiece. HD + Blu-ray DVDs Released: October 23rd, 2007

The Barbara Stanwyck Signature Collection - An icon of film and Noir - While faithfully playing resilient and confident female characters that almost always had a likeable edge - Barbara Stanwyck was born Ruby Catherine Stevens on July 16th, 1907 in New York City to a Canadian immigrant mother from Nova Scotia. Warner Home Video honors the 100th birthday of one of the motion picture industry’s most glamorous stars with her first-ever NTSC DVD set, Barbara Stanwyck The Signature Collection. This release includes six titles across five discs -- Annie Oakley, East Side, West Side, Executive Suite, My Reputation and a Double Feature disc, To Please A Lady and Jeopardy. Each of the discs in the collection contain various special features, including radio programs, vintage cartoons and shorts, and most notably, an incisive commentary by Oscar-winning director Oliver Stone, with his take on Robert Wise’s powerful all-star drama, Executive Suite. DVD Released: October 30th, 2007

Icons of Horror - Sam Katzman - Sam Katzman never made great film classics, instead he produced cost-effective productions that made money for the studios and the financial backers. He is noted for numerous Western films of the 1930s, his Bela Lugosi and East Side Kids features of the 1940s, the 15-chapter Superman serial of 1948, and a string of rock-'n'-roll musicals in the 1950s. At MGM Studios in the 1960s, Katzman produced several Elvis Presley films and singer Roy Orbison's only film, The Fastest Guitar Alive. On the set, Katzman would use his collection of canes as a personal prop, banging them against the floor, or the scenery, when production fell behind schedule. Indeed, the pace of Sam Katzman’s film production from 1950 to 1959 is blistering, touching nearly all the generic bases in the process including the 5 Horror representatives in this new Sony DVD boxset - Creature with the Atom Brain (1955), The Werewolf (1956), Zombies of Mora Tau (1957) and The Giant Claw (1957). DVD Release Date: October 16th, 2007

Parole Inc. - Told in flashbacks this weak 'B' film has very little 'noir' in it although it is listed s such. Performances are transparent and the whole thing lacks suspense and intensity, but for fans of old black and white films this may be worth of a view on late night TV. The plot is as follows: When several notorious criminals are unjustifiably released on parole, the Federal Government smells a rat and sends ace agent Richard Hendricks (Michael O’Shea) to investigate. Richard infiltrates the gang responsible for the parole racket by posing as a much-wanted convict Rick Carson, but the wily Barney Rodescu (Turhan Bey), who is the brain behind the racket, soon finds out Carson’s true identity. Carson’s life is now in grave danger!

The Jack Ryan Collection HD - The box set that was scheduled for October 23rd, 2007 bills the HD DVDs as “Special Collector’s Editions” with the same extras found on the Special Collector’s Edition SD DVDs. However, the discs are actually bare-bones, so Paramount has issued a recall and has pushed back the release date to sometime in the future. Still, some of the mis-labled boxes have already reached the hands of consumers, and some retailers may sell their inventories anyway. Once again, it’s up to you if you want to buy the box set, but be aware that the discs don’t have the advertised extras. HD Boxset DVD Release Date: October 23rd, 2007

A Clockwork Orange HD + BR - Everything about A Clockwork Orange from the casting to the near-future set designs suggest that Stanley Kubrick was at the height of his creative power during this time. If, in fact, you are aware of the initial reaction to the film, Kubrick's mastery of his craft may have been too effective. He wound up voluntarily withdrawing the film from circulation in the UK in 1974 after the movie was blamed on a copycat murder and he and his wife received death threats. It was not re-released in England until after his death in 2000. HD + Blu-ray DVDs Released: October 23rd, 2007

The Young Adventures of Indiana Jones - Indiana Jones was clearly a character that had captured the public’s imagination after three theatrical movies with blockbuster grosses, so executive producer George Lucas decided to move Indy to the small screen with The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. The series began as a string of hour-long shows, though surprisingly anemic ratings persuaded Lucasfilm to shift to making periodic movie specials instead. The show began with Indiana Jones as a child before catching up with the archaeologist as a late teen/young adult. Although the movies focused on Indiana’s spectacular encounters with fantastical elements, the TV show threw our hero into the middle of historical events, with Junior interacting with luminaries such as Pancho Villa and British suffragettes. DVD Release Date: October 23rd, 2007

Face/Off HD - Due to small budgets, rushed shooting schedules, and a variety of other reasons, John Woo’s Hong-Kong productions--even the best ones--have a certain sloppiness/unfinished feel. True, Face/Off doesn’t have Chow Yun-fat, but it has a completeness and emotional resonance that puts it at the top of Woo’s oeuvre with A Better Tomorrow, The Killer, and Once a Thief. The duality and male-bonding themes are there, but Face/Off also benefits from an examination of two families on opposite sides of the law. Female characters are often presented as comical sidekicks or bumbling meddlers in Woo’s movies, but in Face/Off, they’re as serious, tough, and passionate as the men. The opponents want to destroy each other, of course, but the resolution brings the families together in a way that heals them. After years filled with “heroic bloodshed”, Woo showed us the “heroic healing” in which he believes. HD DVD Released: October 30th, 2007

Next 2 weeks on the Calendar: