DVDBeaver Newsletter - December 22nd, 2006
Mele Kalikimaka! - 8 new reviews in this weeks newsletter - half are comparisons. In our last newsletter before Christmas (3 days to go) we wish you all a happy and safe holiday season. We hope to have our Year End Poll completed for next week.
BLU-RAY STORE HD-DVD STORE HIGH DEFINITION DVD STORE
INTERESTING READING - The IndieWire Critics Poll for the year is HERE (Thanks Daryl!)
50% OFF CRITERION BOXSET SALE IS OFFICIALLY OVER! We hope you were able to take advantage!
SOME OTHER HOLIDAY SALES:
Up to 50% OFF on Boxed Set DVDs like Gone with the Wind (Four-Disc Collector's Edition) (1989), The Godfather DVD Collection (2001), The Cary Grant Signature Collection, The Essential Steve McQueen Collection, The Complete James Dean Collection, The Errol Flynn Signature Collection, Jerry Lewis - The Legendary Jerry Collection, The Alec Guinness Collection, Charlie Chaplin Short Comedy Classics - The Complete Restored Essanay & Mutual Collection and MORE! HERE!
Save up to 47% on some titles including Far from Heaven (2002), The Apostle (1998), 21 Grams (2003), The Interpreter (Widescreen Edition) (2005), Lost in Translation (2003), Being John Malkovich (1999), Elizabeth (Special Edition) (1998), Gosford Park (2001) and MORE HERE!
Buy any Indie
DVD and get the 2nd (of lesser value) FREE!
HERE
choices include - Junebug (2005), The Brown
Bunny (2003), Capote (2005), The
Squid and the Whale (2005), Cache (Hidden)
(2005) etc.
NOTE: There's a clearance sale going on at Yesasia.com with as much as 85% off on some titles. Check out our listing for titles to buy.
Easiest way to catch up is simply read the new Newsletter Archive HERE.
Tired of Region 1 messing you around with erratic Bond boxset compilations? AMAZON UK are offering BUY ONE JAMES BOND DVD - GET ONE FREE - HERE
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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LATEST Additions to the Release Calendar (PRE-ORDER!):
The Smugglers and a Girl Is a Gun: The Films of Luc Moullet (1967) - Facets
Jean-Luc Godard Collection Vol.1 (Alphaville, Pierrot Le Fou, Une Femme Est Une Femme, Le Petit Soldat, A Bout De Souffle, La Chinoise And Made In The USA.) R2 UK Optimum
The Big Steal (Don Siegel, 1949) R2 UK - Universal Pictures Video
The Blue Dahlia (George Marshall, 1946) R2 UK
Mr. Moto Collection - Vol. 2 (Mr. Moto's Gamble / Mr. Moto in Danger Island / Mr. Moto Takes a Vacation / Mr. Moto's Last Warning / The Return of Mr. Moto) - 20th Century Fox
Van Gogh (Maurice Pialat, 1992) Sony Pictures
Literary Classics Collection (Madame Bovary (1949), Captain Horatio Hornblower, The Three Musketeers (1948), The Prisoner of Zenda (1937 and 1952 Versions), Billy Budd) - Warner Home Video
RECOMMEND: The big news is Mikio Naruse, Volume 1. One of the best packages of 2006.
I was pretty high on When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts. Spike Lee nails one of the best documentary's of the year.
Abstruse: tread lightly for weird and wonderful - The Black Dahlia and The Illustrated Man make for... ummm... interesting viewing.
New Reviews:
The Illustrated Man
- Based on three futuristic stories by Ray
Bradbury, the film is a curious, pretentious,
science-fiction morality play. Steiger, mannered
and morose, stars with his then-wife Bloom. The
tales tell of parents as victims of zombie like
children, a space-wrecked crew on another
planet, and nearing the end of the world. DVD
Release Date: December 19th, 2006
When the Levees Broke: A
Requiem in Four Acts -
Principally structured as an oral history, Spike
Lee’s four-hour HBO doc charts the horrific
events that have devastated New Orleans in the
last 12 months. The many stories of the
bureaucratic bungling, political scapegoating
and personal traumas in the aftermath of Katrina
are as shocking as the footage of death and
suffering during the storm itself. Lee’s
invaluable film is shot through with feelings of
pain, outrage and exasperation, returning again
and again to the question of how the world’s
richest country could let this happen to its own
people. Two un-shocking answers: race and money.
DVD Release Date: December 19th, 2006
The Black Dahlia
- A tale of personal obsession and institutional
rot, James Ellroy’s narratively sprawling yet
intensely interior novel ‘The Black Dahlia’ was
never going to adapt easily to the screen. But
it had a solid precedent in ‘LA Confidential’
(also from an Ellroy novel) and its key motifs –
doppelgängers, monomania, grotesque violence –
seem a good fit for director Brian De Palma.
Unfortunately, another of De Palma’s pet
fascinations runs away with the show: like many
of the characters, he’s unhealthily ‘enamored of
the flickers’. DVD Release Date: December
26th, 2006
Mikio Naruse, Volume 1
- This box set represents the first DVD release
of any Mikio Naruse films in the
English-speaking world and prefigures more
Naruse releases by the British Film Institute
(UK) and the Criterion Collection (USA)
throughout 2007. Mikio Naruse demands a certain
deserved reverence with film fans. His
non-judgmental cinema creates a flirtation
utilizing an unsentimental balance between
compassion and sensitivity, steeped in subtly
deep melodrama but frequently with an overall
bleak and pessimistic outlook. DVD Release
Date: December 4th, 2006
The Lady Vanishes
- In this best-loved of Hitchcock’s British-made
thrillers, a young woman on a train meets a
charming old lady (Dame May Whitty), who
promptly disappears. The other passengers deny
ever having seen her, leading the young woman to
suspect a conspiracy. When she begins
investigating, she is drawn into a complex web
of mystery and high adventure. See how the new
Essential Art transfer compares to the original
Criterion.
The House of Flying
Daggers - In a form of backwards
progression, director Zhang Yimou appears to be
moving further away from ‘Art House dramas’
again, towards a kind of superlative ‘Shaw
Brothers-ish’ martial arts films. And he does so
better than that particular genre has ever seen…
ever. ‘Beautiful’ may be an understatement as I
doubt I have ever seen anything of such visual
splendor ever before. It is eye and ear candy
that is still pleasurably ringing my senses.
The wooden box edition came out August 24th,
2006.
Don't Come Knocking
- Once again Wenders' darkly romantic view of
the American west dovetails beautifully with
Shepard's own interior landscape, in which lost
fathers — and in this case, sheltering mothers —
loom large as the mesas in the psyches of the
their abandoned sons. Beautifully shot in rich
colors by Franz Lustig, it's possibly Wenders'
most accessible film to date, and among his most
emotionally satisfying.
The Weeping Meadow
- Angelopoulos moves his forces like a
juggernaut to stage formidable set-pieces, coups
de théâtre that impress with their vast scale
without necessarily engaging our emotions. In
his most remarkable feat, he constructs a
low-lying town in a dry lakebed only to drown it
for a spectacular inundation. There follows a
floating funeral on a water-borne raft, players
posed beside the open coffin, as a flotilla of
boats proceeds with a flourish of black flags.
Prows part the water as the camera glides ahead,
like a courtier preparing the way, but a sudden
change of angle confronts us with a massive
phalanx of figures reflected in the floodwater,
with blue sky streaking the top of the frame.
The New Yorker DVD came out Dec 19th, 2006
Next 2 weeks on the Calendar:
Week of December 25th, 2006
Be with Me (Eric Khoo, 2005) Film Movement
The Black Dahlia (Brian De Palma , 2006) Universal Studios
Bon Cop, Bad Cop (Eric Canuel, 2006) Park Ex Pictures Cn
Danika (Ariel Vromen, 2006) First Look Pictures
Factotum (Bent Hamer, 2005) IFC
Hammer Film Noir - Vol. 4 (Terror
Street, Wings of Danger) VCI
Hammer Film Noir - Vol. 5 (The Glass
Tomb, Paid to Kill) VCI
Men of the Mountains (István Szöts, 1942) Bunyik Entertainment
Moscow Elegy (Aleksandr Sokurov, 1987) Ideale Audience
The Spectator (Paolo Franchi, 2004) Syracuse Int'l Film
What Alice Found (A. Dean Bell, 2003) Wellspring Media
Who's Camus Anyway? (Mitsuo Yanagimachi , 2005) Film Movement
Week of January 2nd, 2006
Seven Swords (Hark Tsui, 2005) Weinstein Company
Criterions Available for Preorder Savings: 49th Parallel (Michael Powell , Emeric Pressburger - 1941) Criterion Collection, When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (Mikio Naruse, 1960) Criterion Collection, Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica, 1948) Criterion Collection, Green for Danger (Sidney Gilliat, 1946) Criterion Collection, Border Radio (Allison Anders, Dean Lent, Kurt Voss 1987) - Criterion Collection, Monsters And Madmen (4 DVD Box Set) - (The Haunted Strangler, Corridors of Blood, The Atomic Submarine and First Man into Space) - Criterion Collection, Mouchette (Robert Bresson, 1970) - Criterion Collection, Sanjuro (Akira Kurosawa , 1963) - Criterion Collection, Yojimbo & Sanjuro: Two Films By Akira Kurosawa - Criterion Collection, Yojimbo (REISSUE) (Akira Kurosawa , 1961) - Criterion Collection
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Enjoy,
Gary
P.S. SOME DEALS FROM UK:
Marlene Dietrich (6-disc - Screen Goddess Collection)
- The Lady Is Willing (Dir. Mitchell Leisen, 1942), Shanghai Express (Dir. Josef von Sternberg, 1932), Foreign Affair (Dir. Billy Wilder, 1948), Destry Rides Again (Dir. George Marshall, 1939), Blonde Venus (Dir. Josef von Sternberg), Devil Is A Woman (Dir. Josef von Sternberg, 1935) - R2 UK Universal is 60% OFF HERE ! - 58% off!The Cook Thief, His Wife And Her Lover (1989)
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- 38% off! - 60% off! 60% off! 60% off!Last Year At Marienbad (1961) -
55% off! - 69% off!Sherlock Holmes - The Definitive Collection
- 54% offSherlock Holmes - The Complete Collection
(Jeremy Brett) - 60% off!