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February 21, 2010

Savant's new reviews today are

Cry 'Havoc'
Warner Archive Collection

and
A Man Called Adam
Music Makers
Lionsgate

Greetings! I'll be out of town for part of next week (what, Savant go somewhere?) so my family will probably silence my computer to stop the chimes that go off loudly each time an email comes in. That means I'll be skipping next Satuday's post. But I should have new reviews up late Tuesday, the second of March. I know it's an inconvenience, but life can get tough sometimes. I think the video-loving universe can do without me for a couple of days.

Lo and behold, Savant also has an editing job keeping him busy at the moment. It's a pleasure to be cutting again. The improvements in the digital tools over the last several years are just amazing ... no more sweating out whether or not an edited sequence will play in a different resolution, and working with stills and graphics is a breeze.

I also was contacted for, but could not take, a job cutting another Academy Awards montage, which is too bad. After feeling rather puffed-up over my Jack Cardiff montage a few years back, the Academy switched to "celebrity" montages, which I suspect just meant that big stars prevailed upon their editor associates to create montages with them. I'm looking forward to see what the producer comes up with on Oscar night ... I was told the montage subject is Horror. Hopefully the "horror" angle is not that the number of movies in the running for Best Picture has been doubled, from five to ten.

But enough about me (how is that possible?). I received a lot of mail this week about Olive Films' announcement of a series of Paramount-licensed DVDs. I only know what the web boards know, and hope that they come out in quality encodings, and do well enough so that the series stays active long enough for my personal favorites to be released. Should anybody at Olive get wind of the interest in these pages, I'd love to be contacted ... DVD Savant is the optimum site to promote classic library titles.

An early tip for readers looking for something new and interesting: I'm putting the final touches on my TCM review for Eclipse's George Bernard Shaw on Film, a three title set of delightful movies, all very witty and beautifully made and acted. Pygmalion fans will love Major Barbara and Vivien Leigh is really charming in Caesar and Cleopatra. The American-made Androcles and the Lion has a nice turn from the late Jean Simmons. Thanks for reading, Glenn Erickson



February 19, 2010

Savant's new reviews today are

Capitalism: A Love Story
Blu-ray
Overture / Anchor Bay

I Died a Thousand Times
Warner Archive Collection

and
The Mistake (Verfehlung)
and
The Woman and the Stranger (Die Frau und der Fremde)
DEFA / UMass

Greetings! The big DVD news this week is the emergence of a company called Olive Films that, like Legend Films two years ago, has plans to release a long list of titles licensed from Paramount. Reported first on message boards at the Home Theater Forum and the Criterion Forum, this is apparently real and the only thing in doubt is the optimistic plan to release several discs each month starting in June. Among the titles are a few coveted favorites: Union Station (1950), Dark City (1950), Appointment with Danger (1951), The Mountain (1956), Summer and Smoke (1961), Harlow (1965), Sands of the Kalahari (1965), Hurry Sundown (1967), Skidoo (1968), WUSA (1970), Hannie Caulder (1971), Such Good Friends (1971) and a really desirable title, the 1965 Sci-Fi mini-classic Crack in the World. Let's hope our favorites are early on the release list!

Meanwhile, Patrick Ogle of Facets Video has announced that he's contracted to release discs of most of the output of New German Cinema exponent Alexander Kluge including the two rare Sci-Fi head-scratchers I reviewed a couple of years ago, Der Grosse Verhau and Willi Tobler and the Decline of the 6th Fleet. Patrick has directed us to a Senses of Cinema article on director Kluge: eleven out of twelve film fans have still never heard of him, it seems.

That's it for now -- interesting discs coming in. If you'd like an early peek at a review that won't be at Savant for another week or so, over at TCM Online you'll find my coverage of Lola Montès. Thanks for reading! Glenn Erickson



February 14, 2010

Savant's new reviews today are

The Last King of Scotland
Blu-ray
20th Fox

The Terminal Man
Warner Archive Collection

and
The Last Grenade
Scorpion Releasing

Greetings! For those who can't wait, correspondent Guido Bibra has posted a number of frame blowups from the ARTE broadcast of the recovered & restored Metropolis at his DVDLog.de website. It's in German so you have to scroll down to the line of text reading "Weiter zum Vergleich und den Bildern der gefundenen Szenen". Or go directly to the pix with this Link.

Meanwhile, Savant's correspondent Aitam Bar-Sagi sends a link to a rare 78 rpm record of themes from the original Metropolis score, with a recorded statement (in German) from director Fritz Lang. Click on the images of the record to hear. Great audio quality, too.

Aitam and I started writing each other about Metropolis back in 1998, when he was making elaborate videos and still frame websites to reconstruct the film that is now almost entirely recovered. Aitam's contributions to the German restoration over the years are reflected in a "Thanks" credit they've given him at the end of the new version, a much deserved distinction. After all of our dreams about the missing footage, it seems amazing to have the movie back together again. Wonders never cease. Thanks for reading, Glenn Erickson.



February 12, 2010

Savant's new reviews today are

Paris, Texas
Blu-ray
Criterion

The Story of Three Loves
Warner Archive Collection

and
Everybody's Fine
Miramax

Greetings! A fun link or two are in the offing today: Gary Teetzel forwards an address to see a short animation by Sascha Ciezata called When Lynch Met Lucas. That should be self-explanatory.


Joe Dante sent this steer to a website showing the amazing work of master modelmaker Michael Paul Smith. Be sure to enlarge some of the photos and check them out .... no photoshop effects of any kind were employed. (photo sample to right)


Keith West sends this link to an interesting 1931 Popular Mechanix article called "Most Scientific Fiction Can't Come True". Author William J. Harris assures us that Science Fiction stories about teleportation and outer space rockets are scientific impossibilities! I hope the author was around thirty years later for the Mercury program. Nice graphics from Sci-Fi films of the day as well.


I also just finished watching some of the Berlinale premiere of the recovered, full-length Metropolis LIVE on streaming HD video on the web. The actual event was held in a Berlin concert hall with a live orchestra, but the web feed came from a simo presentation projected on a giant screen erected on the Brandenburg Gate -- note the statuary! The uncut Sci-Fi classic looks very interesting, even when the large audience is standing in the snowy night, staying warm by drinking beer! (photo just below) Can't wait to see Fritz Lang's masterpiece in its full beauty; the plan is still a Blu-ray and DVD release from Kino.

This note just came in from Savant correspondent Guido Bibra, who just finished watching the ARTE European broadcast of the premiere:

Hello Glenn -- Well, that was quite impressive, and I haven't even watched the whole thing yet! ARTE's live-broadcast of the Metropolis premiere from Berlin worked really well - apart from the fact that the Ministerpräsident of Hessen had to make a speech and the movie began ten minutes later than planned.

The broadcast showed the orchestra and the screen at the beginning and a few times during the movie, but that was completely unobtrusive and only when it was really appropriate. ARTE didn't mess up the format: on the standard channel it was shown in true 4:3. The orchestra was really live and it sounded amazingly better than on the previous DVD - I really hope they're going to use the Berlin recording for a future disc.

The newly found scenes were easily identifiable. The quality is really still horrible compared to the rest of the movie, but it's not completely unwatchable and you could certainly see what was going on. Alpha-Omega at least made an effort to stabilize the picture and remove all the flickering and flecks, but the vertical scratches are still there. There were some longer scenes re-inserted, but also througout the movie quite a few instances of short additions, sometimes only seconds. The scenes from the recovered 16mm had black borders on the top and left to match the approximate framing of the 35mm parts. This was explained in the written intro.

There's still one scene and a few other frames missing but the movie makes much more sense now. Especially the subplot about the worker who goes to the Yoshiwara nightclub and is followed by the spy ("der Schmale"). It is now complete - there's actually quite a thriller going on there.

The rest of the movie seemed to be identical to the "old" restoration, but didn't have the "pictureboxing" of the DVD. I can't give you the exact running time but it's approximately 148-150 minutes now. I'm not completely sure at what speed it was actually shown -- it looked like the 25 fps of the old DVD, but I've got some strange ghosting artifacts on my recording so it could as well have been shown at 24 fps and upconverted somehow for the PAL broadcast.

More tomorrow, it's nearly 2 am and I'm really tired! Bye, Guido

Thanks Guido! Glenn Erickson.



February 09, 2010

Savant's new reviews today are

Onimasa
Animeigo

The Deadly Tower
Warner Archive Collection

and
The Internecine Project
Scorpion Releasing

Greetings! I know things are late but I just got back this afternoon and it was raining and -- you know the drill. No special notes or links today -- sorry -- but will do my best for Friday. I have had it confirmed, I'm sorry to say, that Universal's DVD of Matinee will carry no extras at all ... just a trailer, perhaps.

Thanks for reading! Glenn Erickson



February 05, 2010

Savant's new reviews today are

Bad Girls of Film Noir Volume 1
The Killer that Stalked New York,
Two of a Kind, Bad for Each Other, The Glass Wall
Sony

Bad Girls of Film Noir Volume 2
Night Editor, One Girl's Confession,
Women's Prison, Over-Exposed
Sony

The Last Stage
Facets Video / Polart

and
Countdown
Warner Archive Collection

Greetings! I was able to correct an error in last Tuesday's post, but it was too late to keep it from being sent out in the newsletter. I reported that the Toho science fiction film Dogora would be released on Blu-ray by Severin in a couple of months; as it turns out this new "Dogora" is a different movie entirely. It never occurred to me that that title might be given to another movie. My apologies.

Savant correspondent and radio producer Dick Dinman was awarded a Golden Minidisk Award back in January and sent me this photo of him receiving the prize at the awards ceremony. His winning program is the DVD Classics Corner on the Air radio show Seeing Red: A Skelton in Your Closet, an interview piece featuring memories of Red Skelton from stars Arlene Dahl, Ann Rutherford and Betty Garrett.

A great link heads-up from David Erickson, about Lockheed's fake camouflage "neighborhood" erected during WW2, to disguise the aircraft plant from Japanese bombers. I remember reading about this while researching 1941; an early Bob Gale-Robert Zemeckis script included a scene where General Stilwell visits the odd construction. The script said that everything on the seemingly endless array of nets was built at a scale smaller than reality, but I can't tell that from these pictures, at the website Think or Thwim.

Universal has announced a Blu-ray release of Apollo 13 on April 13, and a disc of Dune on April 27. Thanks for reading! Glenn Erickson


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

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