DVD Talk
Reviews & Columns
Reviews
DVD
TV on DVD
Blu-ray
International DVDs
Theatrical
Reviews by Studio
Video Games

Features
Collector Series DVDs
Easter Egg Database
Interviews
DVD Talk Radio
Feature Articles

Columns
Anime Talk
DVD Savant
HD Talk
Horror DVDs
Silent DVD

discussion forum
DVD Talk Forum

Resources
DVD Price Search
Customer Service #'s
RCE Info
Links

Columns




June 29, 2009

Greetings! Savant's new reviews today are

Alain Resnais: a Decade in Film
Life is a Bed of Roses, Love Unto Death,
Mélo, I Want to Go Home
Kino

and
Kuhle Wampe Censored
DRA / DEFA

Great slow start to the summer. Forget looking for real news on TV, which for days has been exclusively about Michael Jackson. Finally caught up with UP, which makes me the 3 billionth person to say, with a bright face, "Gee, that's the best show I've seen this year!" Great 3D, too! What, you already know?

Here's what I'm working on for reviews: Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, Lookin' to Get Out, Last Year at Marienbad, The Seventh Seal and For All Mankind. The last three are fine in Blu-ray. Several reviews are already written but are committed for a release window to TCM Online and Film.com before I can reprint them here. It's not a perfect system, but it puts cornflakes on the table, as they say.

I'm also experiencing a kind of Disc-itis. Relatively few deep library titles are being released, and they're not being pushed by the publicists. I get offers for plenty of recent comedies, kid shows and action films that simply don't appeal. Universal is releasing several desirable DVDs on July 7, like the great Lonely are the Brave, but I doubt that I'll be able to secure screeners. The trick is for me to be grateful for what is being released -- later this year Sony is promising a string of impressive genre collections, including most of Columbia's best films noir. Take a look at the 2009 Savant Wish List, if you haven't lately ... the DVD release landscape is definitely changing.

Thanks for reading as always! Glenn Erickson



June 26, 2009

Greetings! Savant's new reviews today are

Woodstock
3 Days of Peace & Music
40th Anniversary Director's Cut
Warner Home Video

and
Diary of a Suicide
Facets

Reader David Rutsala and advisor Gary Teetzel tell me that, with the Brit TV series The Prisoner due out on Blu-ray this fall, we might start getting our hopes up for The Avengers as well. (This is NOT news of a forthcoming Blu-ray release, just wishful thinking.) According to David, Netflix recently added all the color episodes of "The Avengers" to their "watch instantly" feature. The quality is so good, it's difficult not to imagine a possible Blu-ray release.

That brings up a cogent point. Not very far in the future we'll doubtless see the official "release" of video movies occurring on a non-disc format. We already have the alternate distribution system of the Warners Archive Collection (which, by the way, seem now to be available from Amazon, albeit at a substantial price hike). How soon will online DVD reviewing will become obsolete?

Here's some fun website reading and viewing that Savant actually found for himself today: David Cairns' Shadowplay June 26 page features a hilarious skewering of Roger Corman's war saga The Secret Invasion (as opposed to Savant's sober review, here).

On a footnote to one of David's intriguing articles -- he's using 2009 to sift through Alfred Hitchcock's entire filmography, one film per week -- I found links to delightful clips of "swing baby" Betty Hutton at her manic finest, way before she turned shrill in the 1950s: Old Man Mose, Do You Know About Swinging? and Murder, He Says. Did such energy actually exist back then?

Thanks for reading, Glenn Erickson



June 22, 2009

Greetings! Savant's new reviews today are

The International
Sony

The Diary of Anne Frank
Blu-ray
Fox Home Entertainment

and
Do the Right Thing
Blu-ray
Universal

A slow DVD news day, as we're going into a couple of weeks without a large number of notable disc releases.

Reader Edward Sullivan sent me a terrific link to a career interview with the late British Actor Leo McKern, which happens to give a great many details and observations about the wonderful (and still underexposed) science fiction film The Day the Earth Caught Fire. Illustrated with a number of clips; good information about Edward Judd and Janet Munro. Savant's review of the film is at this link.

Thanks for reading! Glenn Erickson



June 19, 2009

Savant's new reviews today are

Fatal Attraction
Blu-ray
Paramount

Doctor Strangelove
Blu-ray
Sony

and
The Saragossa Manuscript
Mr. Bongo

Hello! A couple-three likely links to ponder:

Savant key advisor Gary Teetzel sent this link to a web page for the new Creature from the Black Lagoon live show musical attraction at Universal Studios. Let me see here, regarding classic monsters at Universal ... Frankenstein and Dracula get respect. The Mummy gets respect too. King Kong gets respect and he's even adopted from RKO. So why no respect for the Gill Man? Well, maybe the show will be the new Thriller or Jesus Christ Evita or whatever.

Halloween offerings are looking a bit thin this year, but correspondent Wayne Schmidt informs us that CBS/Paramount has announced a One Step Beyond First Season DVD. The 1959 TV show still lingers in the nightmares of we young kids foolish enough to watch an episode -- it was a time when children by and large didn't have access to creepy stuff like this. Just seeing John Newland's "serenely threatening" face was enough to put a chill in our spines. A TV Shows on DVD notice for the new disc is here.

Lastly, the cable channel Ovation has been showing an hour-long documentary I edited several years ago about West Side Story. It's called West Side Memories and it's still the best piece available about the creation of the original Broadway musical and the making of the movie, with interviews by Arthur Laurents and Stephen Sondheim. Ovation's web page on the show has a teaser clip for viewing. Thanks for reading! Glenn Erickson



June 15, 2009

Savant's new reviews today are

Waltz with Bashir
Sony Classics

and
The King and Four Queens
MGM-Fox

Yes, yes, only two reviews up today ... busy weekend and I offer no apologies! I do have a couple of nice notes and links to pass on.

Correspondent "B" points out that The Queen of England has Knighted Christopher Lee: BBC News. Now Sir Christopher will have to fend off a million well-wishers calling him "Sir Dracula"!

UK correspondent Lee Broughton found this wonderful John Lennon piece on You Tube ... only a million or two viewers have discovered this before Savant, but it's good: I Met the Walrus. I just don't get how some people can reject Lennon's anti-war promotions as insincere.

And finally, Shaun Chang has found a relative rarity, an entire Navy propaganda docu by John Ford. It's been freshly uploaded to YouTube, in Republic Tru-Color, no less: This is Korea!

And one last-minute announcement: On October 6, Warners will release a set of highly desired Karloff and Lugosi Classics, including Frankenstein 1970, The Walking Dead, You'll Find Out and Zombies on Broadway. Greg Mank and Tom Weaver will be contributing commentaries to the two Karloff features, which will be a big help -- Frankenstein 1970 really needs somebody to make it interesting!

Thanks


June 12, 2009

Savant's new reviews today are

Man Hunt
Fox

Stone
Region 2 Pal Review by Lee Broughton
Severin UK


The Spy Factory
PBS Home Video

and
Falling Down
Blu-ray
Warner Home Video

Hello! No serious announcements today ... keeping up with reviews is the best I can manage. I've been impressed with new Blu-rays of The Seventh Seal and Last Year at Marienbad, and am doing my best to write coherent notices for them ... very often, the better the movie, the more difficult the review. Also coming or in hand are Waltz with Bashir, My Dinner with Andre, Diary of a Suicide, Lookin' to Get Out and Alain Resnais: A Decade in Film on DVD and Do the Right Thing, Dr. Strangelove, The Diary of Anne Frank and Fatal Attraction on Blu-ray. I'm finding that studios freely promote some of their titles but don't always offer screeners of the library-classic fare that attracts me ... which results in some desirable, notable discs being missed.

My review of Woodstock: The Director's Cut just went up over at Film.com ... I really have a soft spot for that show, and why not? When I saw it I was eighteen, had just graduated from High School and was preparing to leave home for the first time. The films you see when you're out and about dating and carousing are always special ..... Thanks for reading, Glenn Erickson.



June 08, 2009

Savant's new reviews today are

Kuhle Wampe
or, Who Owns the World?

DEFA / Omnimago

Valkyrie
Blu-ray
MGM/Fox

Terminator 2
Skynet Edition

Blu-ray
Lionsgate

and
Rifftrax:
Missile to the Moon

Legend Films

Hello! Well, Savant has run into something worth complaining about! I DVR'd MGMHD's HiDef cablecast of Michael Powell's The Red Shoes a couple of days ago and discovered something very disturbing. Ever since about 1970 or so I've been a regular whiner about the practice of Pan-Scanning widescreen movies for flat televisions, pointing out ruined compositions, squeezed title sequences and the famous shots where we see people's noses on each side of the frame while the Pan-Scan stays firmly planted on a table lamp at screen center. The ability to see movies in their real aspect ratios is what pulled me into the expensive hobby of laserdisc collecting; as I'm sure I've said too many times, I bought a 16:9 television in 1995, two years before enhanced DVDs came around, for the express purpose of cropping full-frame transfers of movies that were supposed to be matted for widescreen. Now, in 2009, widescreen TVs are finally the norm and the transition is complete.

That is, until I saw the 1948 The Red Shoes, a flat 4x3 1:37 aspect ratio feature film. MGMHD was showing it Tilt-Scanned to 1:78. Somebody decided that Powell's classic looked nice at the wider ratio -- you know, to fill widescreen TV screens. MGM pillar-boxed The Quatermass Xperiment full-frame, when it should be at least as wide as 1:66, and now they've taken it upon themselves to chop up a widely acknowledged classic. The Red Shoes is a ballet movie, and the first thing that happens in many shots is that feet cross the line out of the bottom of the frame. Masking off feet in a dance movie is a serious problem, to say the least. When Powell and cameraman Jack Cardiff get fancy with mattes, double exposures and strange angles, the Tilt-Scanning slices up compositions and makes it difficult to locate our intended focus. This movie has just had a major restoration / repremiere, and does not need to be "reformatted" to fit our TV screens".

So for heaven's sake, someone sic Martin Scorsese, Thelma Schoonmaker and the disc producers at Criterion on these unenlightened cable people ... let's not let Tilt-Scanning get a foothold on HD video!

----

So, back to the normal warped weirdness that passes for news around stately DVD Savant Mansion:

Joe Dante forwarded this rather impressive act of "stunt projecting" from Film-Tech.com. Having been a (mediocre) projectionist myself, I appreciate this kind of demented achievement.

Correspondent Art Fisher forwards the information that a title announced last year, and then cancelled, is back on the schedule again. The Italian Ulysses from 1954 (the Kirk Douglas / Anthony Quinn version excerpted in the long cut of Cinema Paradiso) has now been given an August 4 release date from Lionsgate. Thanks for reading! Glenn Erickson



June 05, 2009

Savant's new reviews today are

The Jack Lemmon Film Collection
Phffft, Operation Mad Ball, The Notorious Landlady,
Under the Yum Yum Tree, Good Neighbor Sam

Sony

The Moody Blues Live 1970
At the Isle of Wight Festival
Eagle Rock Entertainment


American Experience:
A Class Apart

PBS Home Video

and
Pigs, Pimps and Prostitutes:
3 Films by Shohei Imamura

Pigs and Battleships,
The Insect Woman, Intentions of Murder

Criterion

Greetings! A few bits of interesting news: Correspondent Dean Blake tells me that Amazon now lists a hard release date of August 18 for Sony's Icons of Sci-Fi: Toho Collection, featuring the classic Japanese fantasy films The H-Man, Battle in Outer Space and Mothra. Hey, after two years of waiting, that's only a couple of months away! Full retail is 24.95. I certainly hope the set will include the original Japanese versions, which are longer and have different music, extra songs, etc.

Correspondent Art Fisher has tipped me to the fact that the Warners Archive Collection titles are now available through the Turner Classic Movies website, with a slight discount! The new listing is on a page called TCM Vault Collection.

Joe Dante tips us to a website that features opening title sequences and main themes from Ten "Lost" 60s TV Shows. Wow, there were several there that I didn't know about ... and I think that Johnny Staccato is from the late 1950s ....

Thanks for reading! Glenn Erickson


Don't forget to write Savant at [email protected].

Advertise With Us

Review Staff | About DVD Talk | Newsletter Subscribe | Join DVD Talk Forum |
Copyright © DVDTalk.com All rights reserved | Privacy Policy | Terms of Use | Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information