DVDBeaver Newsletter - November 5th, 2007

Wimafa shoo! - 17 new and scattered reviews this week. We are really all over the place this newsletter from Godard to Pixar animation - from Korean drama to Lynch TV. Thanks to many review contributors. Two new contests, sales, calendar updates, recommendations... are you with us?

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FEATURE DVD OF THE MONTH (NOVEMBER): 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.  Reviewed HERE Available to order at Amazon - Blu-ray + HD-DVD

Hi-Def News: Could be what many have been waiting for - Samsung's upcoming BD-UP5000 HD DVD/Blu-ray dual high-definition player. Coming this January.

SALE (Thanks Irina!): The David Lean Collection 9 films! (Brief Encounter, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, Madeleine, The Passionate Friends, The Sound Barrier, Hobson's Choice, This Happy Breed, and Blithe Spirit) From R2 UK - ITV DVD is 60% OFF! at Amazon UK HERE.

SALE: Save up to 50% on DVD Boxed Sets including - Alfred Hitchcock - The Masterpiece Collection (52% OFF!), The Marx Brothers Silver Screen Collection (53% OFF!), Preston Sturges - The Filmmaker Collection (53% OFF!) and many more HERE!

CONTEST ACTIVITY:

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

LAST WEEK: Winner identifying the 3 clips from the week from Oct 29th (Whirlpool, Spider-Man 2 and The Best Years of Our Lives) was Sean Gleason (wins a sealed Warner 3-disc boxset of The Jazz Singer (1927)) Congrats Sean!

SECOND CONTEST: Also see another new CONTEST in Leonard's Dae Jang Geum review HERE!

Beaver citing: Michael Philip's article in Chicago Tribune Oct 31st, 2007 HERE

BIG THANKS!: DVDBeaver would not exist without the support of many patrons - those who generously donate, and especially those who use our Amazon and YesAsia links. That's it. When you go to Amazon - PLEASE use one of our links to get there (they are on every page - top and bottom - and we have 5000 webpages). It costs you absolutely nothing and we get a small commission on items you purchase. This helps pay our bills - in fact it's the only thing that pays our bills.

STRATEGIES: The best way to take full advantage of Amazon is to use PRE-ORDERs - lock in at the discount price by ORDERING - if perchance you decide against the purchase you have until the release date to cancel - at no charge.

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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!) Well Paradjanov, Lana Turners' Portrait in Black & Madame X, finally Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, a second Joan Crawford set, Criterion's Miss Julie, and a bump of Kramer's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Amazing stuff for so few releases listed. The rest:

New Reviews:.

From what I reviewed I loved Twin Peaks - The Definitive Gold Box Edition ,  Potemkin, and (as I've been called a 'stooge' many times) The Three Stooges Collection, Volume One: 1934-1936(Nyuk, Nyuk, Nyuk). Thanks to Per-Olaf I'll be getting Do You Remember Dolly Bell and Dans Paris. I look forward to Pixar Shorts Vol. 1 and Ratatouille (arrive tomorrow). A big thanks to Michael's review of Nais and Eric's for Red Psalm. Leonard's got me keen on Korean drama and I may indulge with Dae Jang Geum. Thanks to Matthew for warning me to avoid Excalibur HD. Ditto for Leonard with Mr. Brooks BR - I saw in SD and it was the worst Hollywood film I've seen in a decade.

Twin Peaks - The Definitive Gold Box Edition (The Complete Series) - From three-time Academy-Award nominee for directing David Lynch ("The Elephant Man," "Blue Velvet," and "Mulholland Drive") and Mark Frost comes the wildly imaginative, darkly comic mystery-thriller series that is one of the most acclaimed events in television history, "Twin Peaks"... DVD Release Date: October 30th, 2007

Dae Jang Geum - Dae Jang Geum was the show that introduced me to Korean television drama in 2005 and it set the bar high for all that followed. I am fond of describing it to the unsuspecting as a kind of Upstairs, Downstairs scenario where a considerable amount of the drama plays out in the kitchen. In some ways, it's not a facile comparison, for they are almost exactly the same length - except that the BBC production, which took over five years to film, suggested more a play than a movie. Not so with this Korean series, which boasts production values second to none for a TV show from any country.

Excalibur HD - Then I saw it on DVD for the first time in 1999 and was brought right back to that place I was as a child, reliving the magic and wonder of it all. At that time I wasn’t paying attention to grain and mosquito noise, I was simply watching a rewind to my youth. For the first time I was able to watch it in widescreen and the TV I was watching it on was a 27 inch Sony Vega, I was starting to understand that widescreen was everything and pan and scan was the devil.

Mr. Brooks BR - Ordinarily I am less than fond of Kevin Costner, but here his default monotone personality is used to advantage as a prosperous, high profile businessman and family man who is also an effective serial killer. What's interesting about our Mr. Brooks is that he sees his murderous ways as an addiction that requires the help of a 12-step program to keep in check. Of course, he doesn't admit to his addiction, so he never gets past Step 1, a point that the filmmakers never seem to grasp. What they do understand is that there is an attraction to his killing that trumps all efforts to overcome it. Blu-ray Release Date: October 23rd, 2007

Do You Remember Dolly Bell - Do You Remember Dolly Bell? filmed 1981, is the first feature film directed by Emir Kusturica. Showing early signs of the stylistic flair that Kusturica was to effectively deploy in later works, it is a coming of age story that many of his fans consider a must-see.

Dans Paris - Throughout the film, Paris looms large as a beautiful, vibrant city whose inhabitants are getting ready for Christmas and the jazzy score by Alex Beaupain hits just the right note in this consistently entertaining and stylish film.

Red Psalm - East Side Story, a recent documentary about communist musicals, assumes that communist-bloc directors were just itching to make Hollywood extravaganzas and invariably wound up looking strained, square, and ill equipped. But Red Psalm (1971), Miklos Jancso’s dazzling, open-air revolutionary pageant, is a highly sensual communist musical that employs occasional nudity as lyrically as the singing, dancing, and nature; within its own idioms it swings as well as wails. Set near the end of the 19th century, when a group of peasants have demanded basic rights from a landowner and soldiers arrive on horseback, Red Psalm is composed of less than 30 shots, each one an intricate choreography of panning camera, landscape, and clustered bodies.

Two or Three Things I Know About Her - Two or Three Things I Know About Her was the second of three features by Jean-Luc Godard to open in 1967. It was followed by Weekend and has been surpassed by few films, then or now, for plastic dynamism and intellectual spark.

Nais - It's easy to see why Marcel Pagnol was attracted to Zola's tale of Naïs Micoulin. Naïs, a country girl, is seduced by a young man from the city. Her over-possessive father opposes the relationship, while a local factory worker, Toine, a hunchback played by the popular comic actor Fernandel, pines in secret for Naïs. These are themes that Pagnol had explored already, notably in Angèle and La Fille du puisatier, and to which he would return in Manon des sources. Pagnol wrote the adaptation and dialogue for Naïs and closely supervised the production, involving himself to such an extent that he was effectively co-director with Raymond Leboursier. DVD Release Date: September 15th, 2007

Pixar Shorts Vol. 1 - Pixar Short Films Vol. 1 is the first collection of short movies that Pixar Animation Studios produced. Vol. 1 begins in 1984 with “The Adventures of Andre and Wally B.” and ends in 2007 with “Lifted”. Some of these shorts were created for the short-films market, but many of them began appearing before Pixar features in movie theatres. With the explosion of DVD extras came short films that were created specifically to augment a feature film’s debut on home video. DVD Release Date: November 6th, 2007

Ratatouille - The moral of Ratatouille is delivered by a critic: a gaunt, unsmiling fellow named Anton Ego who composes his acidic notices in a coffin-shaped room and who speaks in the parched baritone of Peter O’Toole. “Not everyone can be a great artist,” Mr. Ego muses. “But a great artist can come from anywhere.” Quite so. Written and directed by Brad Bird and displaying the usual meticulousness associated with the Pixar brand, Ratatouille is a nearly flawless piece of popular art, as well as one of the most persuasive portraits of an artist ever committed to film. It provides the kind of deep, transporting pleasure, at once simple and sophisticated, that movies at their best have always promised. DVD Release Date: November 6th, 2007

The Two Jakes - The people involved with Chinatown wanted to make a trilogy. The first is about stealing water. The second is about stealing oil. The second did poorly at the box office and didn’t catch most critics’ fancy, so there is no Part III. The Two Jakes (aka Chinatown II) itself had such a rough time getting to the big screen that no less than Jack Nicholson had to step into the director’s shoes in order for the project to be completed. DVD Release Date: November 6th, 2007

Nashville - The funniest epic vision of America ever to reach the screen. Robert Altman's movie is at once a GRAND HOTEL-style narrative, with 24 linked characters; a country-and-Western musical; a documentary essay on Nashville and American life; a meditation on the love affair between performers and audiences; and an Altman party. In the opening sequences, when Altman's people-the performers we associate with him because he has used them in ways no one else would think of, and they've been filtered through his sensibility-start arriving, and pile up in a traffic jam on the way from the airport to the city, the movie suggests the circus procession at the non-ending of 81. But Altman's clowns are far more autonomous; they move and intermingle freely, and the whole movie is their procession.

First Name: Carmen - "I'm the girl who shouldn't be called Carmen," says the voice of Maruschka Detmers following the title card. Godard's modern variation on Prosper Merimee's CARMEN (also done by Otto Preminger with CARMEN JONES [1954] and Radley Metzger with CARMEN, BABY [1967]) begins with Carmen asking her voluntarily institutionalized eccentric filmmaker uncle (Godard himself in a funny performance) for the use of his house by the beach to make a film (actually she plans to use it as a hideout after a heist). The ensuing heist leads to the meeting of Carmen and security guard Joseph (Jacques Bonnaffe) who fall in love. Joseph joins the gang in plans to abduct an industrialist and hold him for ransom but its Joseph's obsession and Carmen's faithlessness (here more of an alienated response) that brings about the tragic ending more so than the kidnapping - which Godard's character turns up to direct - gone wrong.

The Rape of the Vampire - Three strangers arrive at a chateau inhabited by four women believed to be vampires. But are they vampires or are they under the hypnotic machinations of an old man? Rollin shot the first part of this film as a short subject to be billed with an American vampire film bought by a distributor that just over an hour (it too was designed for double billing). His producers were impressed with what he accomplished with next to nothing and asked him to expand the film to feature length. Thus, the first half hour (part one) is an intriguing short that makes the most of its found locations, make-shift production design, and available lighting (and a very early example of a turntable effect around two arguing actors to heighten the intensity of the scene).

Battleship Potemkin - Probably one of the most surprisingly unwatched of the classic genre films, Sergei Eisenstein’s Bronenosets Potyomkin ( Battleship Potemkin ) made in 1925 has not maintained a distinctive impact on modern audiences. It was voted the greatest film of all time at the Brussels, Belgium, World's Fair in 1958 and the following year ``Citizen Kane'' had its giant re-release and went to the top of the list for the next 40+ years. DVD Release Date: October 23rd, 2007

The Three Stooges Collection, Volume One: 1934-1936 - Up until now the Three Stooges on DVD has been a real mix'n match hodge-podge of un-restored titles and illogical entries. This new Sony boxset - The Three Stooges Collection, Volume One: 1934-1936 seems to be the first concert effort to categorize their huge body of work chronologically with many shorts seeing the digital light for the first time. DVD Release Date: October 30th, 2007

Next 2 weeks on the Calendar: