DVDBeaver Newsletter for December 15th, 2005
Hi friends! Is it just me - or is there a shortage of decent Region 1 releases these days? You'd think this would be the premium time to list (Holidays and all). Well, a lot are coming in January anyway... Chicago Beavers? - we will be mentioned in the Dec 30th issue of the Chicago Tribune - Can a kind recipient can send us the scoop! (mucho thanks)
13 reviews/updates this week, a big sale at Amazon.UK, a long-awaited classic western, Tourneur, Nick Ray, Pasolini and more - and in case you missed it - March 2006 Criterions are listed HERE - exciting times indeed. Our Calendar has been updated !
Those with overly sophisticated mail clients - you may read our newsletter via the web HERE.
NEWS: Artificial Eye to release Bela Tarr's Satantango in 2006!
Artificial Eye SALE AT AMAZON UK
(CLICK TITLES FOR MORE)
Werckmeister Harmonies,
Uzak,
Stalker,
Waiting for Happiness,
Father and Son,
Godard's Week-end,
Ozu's End of Summer,
Iosselliani's Monday Morning,
Le Chinon D'Olga,
Many Kieslowski films
Watch for: Those Who Love Me Can Take The Train (only DD 2.0 sound), Japon (the film is cut by 51 seconds),
DVDBeaver's TOP YesAsia picks
are
HERE. One of the best
e-tailors on the web.
MORE FOX NOIRS COMING IN MARCH!
(CLICK TITLES FOR MORE) The House on Telegraph Hill (Robert Wise, 1951), No Way Out (Joseph L. Mankiewicz1950), Fallen Angel (Otto Preminger -1945)
RECOMMENDATIONS... We weren't banking on much from Wellspring's Café Lumiere but it exceeded our expectations on the Extras department. Pasolini's Teorema is an important film about values and the importance of life. Bout' time Partner! - How long have we western genre fans waited for a film-to-DVD of this pair: Boetticher/Scott - well its here: Seven Men From Now. Rays Bigger Than Life is a cinematic monster and a crime its not out in Region 1... finally how did this baby - The Five Pennies get lost in the shuffle? Its fabulous!
Most Recent Reviews and Comparisons:
Manderlay - With ”Manderlay”, Lars von Trier sharpens his criticism of
the US; here alluding on Bush’s policy towards the current war. While the
narrative context and mold is the same as in “Dogville”,
“Manderlay” stands as a mirror image of “Dogville”.
Where Grace passively accepted her submission, she now active participates in
dissolving the oppression of society. Where problems were external in
“Dogville”, they are now internal. Even von Trier's mise-en-scene by colors is
inversed; in “Dogville”
white on black, now black on sandy white.
Café
Lumiere - The opening shot of this pensive masterpiece is the Shochiku
Studio logo, former studio of the great Yasujiro Ozu. Cut to a scene of a young
woman on the telephone that is shot in long take from the fixed frame of a low
angle camera. Move onto the following scene that has the same young woman on a
train, insert a well-timed jump cut and suddenly, as if awakening from a dream,
we find the vision of Yasujiro Ozu is no more, and the reality that this is in
fact a Hou Hsiao-hsien film, begins to take form. See how the new Wellspring
fares against the hurried Asian release.
Teorema
- Pasolini's meditation on lack of communication and understanding among
bourgeoisie. It's his "Discreet alienation of the bourgeoisie", if you will. The
film is full of allegory images, that some find too pretentious. The eccentric
Italian director's atmospheric tale of a prominent, dysfunctional Milanese
family which engineers its own destruction when a spiritually minded stranger
moves in on them. Check out the newish Koch Lorber release
Batman Begins - an impressive support cast, Liam Neeson, Michael Caine,
Morgan Freeman, Gary Oldman, Tom Wilkinson, Rutger Hauer and Cillian Murphy,
“Batman Begins” dwells in strong characters. Caine is the definitive Alfred;
everyone else pales next to his dry British sarcasm and butlers code, and has
some of the best lines in the film. “Batman Begins” is the best (super)hero film
since Singer’s “X-Men 2”, which together with Burton’s “Batman Returns” forms a
trio of highly entertaining masterpieces of comic book cinema.
Saint Ralph - Set in Hamilton in 1954, Saint Ralph is the unlikely story
of Ralph Walker, a ninth grader who outran everyone's expectations except his
own in his bold quest to win the Boston Marathon. Ralph is a fatherless
14-year-old with a seriously ill mother, who knows he's a time bomb waiting to
explode into greatness, except that he has no idea where that greatness will
manifest itself. An unfortunate incident of self-abuse in the community pool
inadvertently sets him on this road when, as penance, Ralph is conscripted to
the cross-country team. Desperate to believe a miracle will bring his mother out
of a coma, Ralph becomes a convert to the church of running, and determines to
win the Boston Marathon.
Seven Men From Now - Praised by the pioneering French critic Andre Bazin
as "one of the most intelligent westerns I know but also the least
intellectual," this 1956 feature by the underrated Budd Boetticher stresses
action over dialogue while constructing a subtle moral allegory. Randolph Scott
plays an ex-sheriff trailing the seven men who murdered his wife in a robbery;
along the way he picks up a bumbling couple en route to California and an outlaw
(Lee Marvin, whose appealing swagger contrasts with Scott's laconic certitude).
Boetticher uses the landscape not as a metaphor for wildness but as a starkly
neutral ground on which his characters play out their shifting positions, which
suggests that each individual is responsible for his or her own choices. The
taut opening is stunning: the protagonist strides into a tightly framed patch of
ground from behind the camera, initiating his attempts to both traverse and
dominate space, and the ensuing gunfire offscreen accompanies images of the
horses he'll take from the men he's killing, a beautiful elision that emphasizes
destiny over violence.
Peter Tscherkassky - Peter Tscherkassky is without
question one of the most innovative and interesting avant-garde filmmakers to
have emerged from Austria during the last 25 years. He exclusively uses found
footage, which is then heavily edited in his dark room. In a laboriously
process, he manually alters every single frame until he has the results he is
satisfied with. Tscherkassky has explained his love for very dense films with
multiple layers and that is exactly what his films look like. Take for instance
his highly acclaimed film ‘Outer Space’ which uses scenes from the 1981 horror
film ‘The Entity’, but reorganizes them in such a way it becomes a totally
different film altogether.
High Heels - Abril is the newsreader who decides to get in touch with
her estranged mother, a celebrated singer (Paredes). Their painful reunion is
complicated even further as Abril is now married to her mother's former lover.
When her mother rekindles the affair and he ends up dead, both find themselves
under suspicion. Almodóvar's tragicomedy is occasionally - as one would expect
from this director - overblown and extravagant, but generally Almodóvar is in a
more restrained mood than usual, which becomes especially evident in the
extraordinarily moving scene when Abril reacts to the death of her husband live
on air. It is when he is in this mode that Almodóvar can't help showing his
maturity, and one day he will make his masterpiece, but High Heels is not quite
it. Abril shows what a versatile actress she is and it is impossible to imagine
the film without her moving performance.
The Five Pennies - Loring "Red" Nichols is a cornet-playing country boy
who goes to New York in the 1920s full of musical ambition and principles. He
gets a job playing in Wil Paradise's band, but quits to pursue his dream of
playing Dixieland jazz. He forms the "Five Pennies" which features his wife,
Bobbie, as vocalist. At the peak of his fame, Red and Bobbie's daughter,
Dorothy, develops polio. Red quits the music business to move to Los Angeles
where the climate is better for Dorothy. As Dorothy becomes a young teen, she
learns of her father's musical past, and he is persuaded to open a small
nightclub which is failing until some noted names from his past come to help
out.
Anne of the Indies - Forty years before Cutthroat Island came Jacques
Tourneur's interpretation of equal rights in piracy, here, Jean Peters is a
notorious female pirate who unwittingly falls for the former pirate captain
(Louis Jourdan) secretly spying on her for the British. There's a fair bit of
mildly engaging swash and buckle here, while Peters makes for a comely love
interest-cum-villainess, but otherwise this never rises beyond the level of
standard B-Movie frolic. Wet Sunday afternoon entertainment.
Bigger Than Life - A superbly shot critique of the suffocating
conformity, repression and materialism at the heart of middle-class life, Bigger
Than Life is the American Beauty of 50s cinema. It may not be as well known to
audiences as Rebel Without A Cause and In A Lonely Place, but Nicholas Ray's
allegorical domestic melodrama lays claim to being the maverick American
director's finest and most subversive work
World Poker Tour: The
Best of Season THREE - the most exciting I have ever seen from the 100's
I have witnessed. The 'World Poker Open' in Tunica and the 'World Poker Finals'
were exhausting in their excitement levels. It was the most draining and highly
interesting poker ever televised, both because of the ultra-aggressive play and
the huge stakes.
World Poker Tour: Season
ONE - This is very decent value for the money - over 20 hours of the
inaugural season of the World Poker Tour 5-discs with 3 X 1.5 hour tournaments
finals on each. This is a lot of poker for anyone to watch.
Upcoming
Releases:
The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (Jean-Marie Straub/Daničle Huillet, 1968) New Yorker
Serenity (Widescreen Edition) (Joss Whedon - 2005) - Universal Studios Home Entertainment
Seven Men From Now (Budd Boetticher - 1956) Special Collector's Edition - Paramount Home Video
Toy Story 2 (2-Disc Special Edition) - Buena Vista Home Video
2046 (Wong Kar-wai, 2004) Sony
Cafe Lumiere (Hsiao-hsien Hou - 2003) Wellspring Media
The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill (Irving - 2003) New Video Group
The Bad Sleep Well (Akira Kurosawa, 1963) Criterion Collection
Ballad of Cable Hogue - Warner Home Video
Cabin in the Sky (Vincente Minnelli - 1943) Warner Home Video
Dear Wendy (Thomas Vinterburg, 2005) Metrodome [R2-UK]
Eraserhead
(David Lynch, 1977) - Absurda/ Subversive
The Green Pastures
(Marc Connelly, William Keighley - 1936) Warner
Home Video
Hallelujah (King Vidor - 1929) - Warner Home Video
Island in the Sun (Robert Rossen - 1957) Fox Home Entertainment
Pinky (Elia Kazan - 1949) - Fox Home Entertainment
Sam Peckinpah's Legendary Westerns Collection (The Wild Bunch / Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid / Ride the High Country / Ballad of Cable Hogue - Warner Home Video
Saraband (Ingmar Bergman, 2004) Sony
The Short Films of David
Lynch (2006) - Absurda/
Subversive
Tony Takitani
(Jun Ichikawa, 2005) Strand
Triple Agent
(Eric Rohmer, 2004) Koch Lorber
Vidas Secas
(Nelson Pereira dos Santos, 1963) New Yorker
Orson Welles Box Set: Citizen Kane/The
Magnificent Ambersons/Touch of Evil (Welles,
1941/1942/1958) Universal [R2-UK]
Stormy Weather (Andrew L. Stone - 1943) - Fox Home Entertainment
Wishing you the best in this Holiday season,
Gary
P.S. BOOK RECOMMENDATION (PERFECT Holiday reading): THE STORY OF FILM - Mark Cousins's chronological journey through the worldwide history of film is told from the point of view of filmmakers and moviegoers. We learn how filmmakers influenced each other; how contemporary events influenced them; how they challenged established techniques and developed new technologies to enhance their medium. Striking images reinforce the reader's understanding of cinematic innovation, both stylistic and technical. MORE INFO HERE