Greetings! Savant's new reviews today are

The Messenger:
The Story of Joan of Arc
Blu-ray
Sony

Irma Vep
Essential Edition
Zeitgeist

and
Capricorn One
Lionsgate

Not quite ready for Thanksgiving yet -- I'm writing reviews and still checking out that amazing LIFE magazine photo archive. Pictures from The Thing from Another World show James Arness being outfitted with smoke hoses to film his electrical demise -- Craig Reardon points out the "ICE" sign on a building in the background, indicating that the location is one of those downtown ice-making warehouses, to get the visible breath on actors' faces. The beaucoup stills for When Worlds Collide show the miniature makers working on the great spaceship model. Several shots of the panoramic painting of the new planet Zyra probably squelch the Savant theory that the cartoonish artwork was some kind of temp effort. Destination Moon's shots of the moon set show space-suited midgets in use, to make the set look deeper and larger! And most big Hollywood stars and directors have a photo or two - I even found new images of Val Lewton.

Over at Film.com, my enthusiastic review is up for the Walt Disney Treasures deluxe tin boxes, A Mouseketeer Named Annette and a Duck Named Donald. Have a fine and safe Thanksgiving! -- Glenn Erickson

Greetings! Savant's new reviews today are

300
Limited Collector's Edition
Warner DVD

A Christmas Story
Blu-ray
Warners

and
Revenge of a Kabuki Actor
AnimEigo

An online treat -- Color LIFE magazine images from the Universal backlot of Julia Adams and our friend The Gill Man are now online -- see them here, on Google. Makeup expert & correspondent Craig Reardon tells me that the Creature's 'golden sheen' and red lips are believed to have been added for the still photo shoot -- in the movies the monster was just plain green! Thanks to Bob Furmanek for this great link.

And thanks also to Bill Warren for a link to the same LIFE magazine resource -- this time a full B&W photo shoot of the amazing XENOMORPH from It Came from Outer Space. The wonders never cease!

This Spiegel Online clip is also being passed around online ... security camera footage of the dining room of a fancy cruise liner that suddenly begins rocking out of control. It gets pretty crazy: Spiegel Online Video. The calm German narration and drum music track only make it funnier.

For the record, I'm taking a couple of days off around Thanksgiving, but the reviews will continue here at DVD Savant ... thanks for all the support! If you're new to the site and / or happen to like what you read (Hello? Where'd everybody go?) let me take this opportunity to promote the amazing, fantastic, non-toxic original DVD Savant Review Resource Book, which is still in print and readily available. Thanks for reading! Glenn Erickson

Greetings! Savant's new reviews today are

WALL-E
3-Disc Blu-ray
Disney DVD

Tropic Thunder
Blu-ray
Director's Cut
Paramount

A Shari Lewis Christmas
S'More / UCLA Film & Television Archive

and
Quo Vadis
Warner Home Entertainment

The image is from Georges Franju's Judex, now out in region 2 only, on a double bill with Franju's Shadowman. I haven't gotten permission to use his name, but a friendly reader made the image by pasting together three video frames from a dramatic tilt up, the one that introduces Maurice Jarre's great title theme. I think I may just have to track this one down. A friend and I have a joke -- any rarity we buy is guaranteed to come out on region one within six months. So we're really providing a public service!

A quiet weekend for Savant E-mail. I drove to San Diego and back yesterday, to pick up a carload of old film books from a professor-scholar friend who is retiring and leaving the country. Not only does he have dozens of books I've always wanted to read and scores of useful reference volumes, he has entire runs of 70s film magazines specializing in progressive film theory, the kind of stuff I wasn't ready to absorb at UCLA. That was when I quietly switched from critical studies to film production -- without telling anybody on the faculty. Just try that one in a film school now.

I had second pick of the books but the person ahead of me -- a Savant correspondent who nominated me for the honor -- was interested in other subjects. The professor had a really obscure rarity called L'Erotisme au cinema by Lo Duca -- a notorious early sixties' volume, basically a French photo book on high-quality paper that gathered stills in remarkable quality of seemingly every salacious and provocative scene ever to grace a European film. You might have heard the book mentioned in critical essays from the sixties. People placed Lo Duca on their coffee table, as American film freaks once placed Kenneth Anger's books. We had a copy in UCLA's Theater Arts Reading Room. I remember my boss deciding that I was too young to read it (I was 22!) Fellow librarian Jim Ursini got a good laugh out of that one.

Anyway, I quietly moved L'Erotisme au cinema to my stack of books. A few minutes later it was back up on the shelf. My benefactor was no fool and I immediately congratulated him on the wisdom of hanging onto it!

On the way back I passed Disneyland. Foreign readers might not know that one can see the Matterhorn mountain and the Space Mountain attractions from the freeway. Big brushfires in Palos Verdes had the air thick with smoke and ash, and I couldn't help but think of all the Disneyland tourists trying to enjoy themselves with stinging eyes and ashes raining from the sky. Los Angeles is like Pompeii again, with white ash everywhere. I live miles from any of the fires, not far from downtown in the middle of the city. But hundreds of houses have been lost this time and the devastation is really enormous. I hope they get it all under control post haste. What with all the disturbing economic news, this a really shaky time. Thanks for reading! -- Glenn Erickson

Savant's new reviews today are

Thunderball
Blu-ray
MGM - Fox

JFK -- Probing the Wounds
A second JFK essay-review by
Jon Paul Henry

To Hi-Def with Love: Restoring 007
Bond by Lowry Digital
Savant Article

and
Casino Royale (1967)
Collector's Edition
MGM

Greetings! In honor of today's release of Quantum of Solace, 3 of 4 entries today are 007 - related!

Gary T. has tipped me off that Hi Def Digest is reporting that Universal's 2005 King Kong will be out on Blue-ray on January 20. Both theatrical and extended cuts will be included on the disc, but few extras.

The DVD Freak site has a new page up on an Italian disc of The Horrible Dr. Hichcock that says kind things about my Horror Reader Hichcock Essay, as well as some terrific frame grabs (illustrated). I only hope somebody somewhere (Hey, Criterion!) does a version that uses actor Robert Flemyng's English dialogue track, as it makes all the difference.

I received several responses to my Oliver Stone / JFK review, pointing me to websites debunking the Stone/Garrison claims. As I'm an easy target for some of Stone's underlying claims, the new information just adds to the already unstable heap of contradictory assassination info already clogging my brain; it's just too much to process. Rather than get involved in all the Grassy Knoll controversy -- hey, Savant has illusions of political relevance, but he's not crazy -- I'm printing a really good essay on JFK by Savant correspondent Jon Paul Henry written back in 1992. It's well written and will hopefully provide some balance to my views.

Scarecrow! Over at Film.com, I have a new review up for Disney's Dr. Syn: The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh. I missed this on TV when I was 12, but I remember my friends being impressed by Patrick McGoohan's burlap mask, which was plenty weird for the time. Also just up at Film.com is my new review of the Sunset Boulevard Centennial DVD. Thanks for reading! Glenn Erickson

Savant's new reviews today are

Hancock
Blu-ray
Sony

JFK (Director's Cut)
Blu-ray
Warner Home Video

Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Blu-ray
Dreamworks / Warners

and
Taxi to the Dark Side
ThinkFilm / Image

Greetings! A cute link from Stuart Galbraith IV in Japan ... a video of "normal" service Japanese customers receive at gas stations. Pretty impressive!

Sony's firmware update for my BDP S300 arrived yesterday, with three pages of instructions on how to install it. It worked, so I treated myself to some extras from Dr. No, including my first look at a Lowry Restoration extra I edited .... four years ago. Let's see, the discs came out October 21 ... Sony offered the update on October 30, and I got my machine upgraded on November 8. I'm glad that it worked, but I hope this doesn't happen too often. Not necessarily for myself, but for Mr. Blu-ray customer who pops in a disc for his anxious kids ... and must wait almost three weeks to enjoy what he paid for. But that Blu-ray HD image is addictive, I'll tell ya right now ...

Correspondent and friend Gordon Thomas has a new roundup of classy DVD notices up over at the Bright Lights Film Journal ... Gordon has a much different opinion for Peter Watkins' Privilege than I did.

Finally, I stumbled onto more Metropolis news in this online article from the Ecuadorian newspaper El Telégrapho about a newly discovered 9.5mm film version of the entire cut. You have to click on a link called "Cultura" up top, and then wait for a photo from Metropolis to load and ... well, you'll have to figure it out. The revelation of the Argentinian Discovery earlier this year was so well handled, I don't know what to make of the sketchy nature of this report ... is it reliable? I'd like to think so, especially if the copy is of better quality or helps complete the uncut film. The report says that only in 2006 was the print discovered to be a long version ... many cans of film in the Chilean archive were relabeled in 1973 to avoid being seized and destroyed by the Pinochet regime. The plan is to send the 9.5 mm print (a European non-theatrical format with perfs in the middle of the film, on the frame line) to the Murnau-Stiftung people in Germany. Thanks for reading -- Glenn Erickson

Savant's new reviews today are

Planet of the Apes
Blu-ray
Fox

Kenji Mizoguchi's Fallen Women
Osaka Elegy, Sisters of the Gion,
Women of the Night, Street of Shame
Eclipse

The Last Laugh
(Restored Deluxe Edition)
Kino

and
Blossoms in the Dust
(Warner Brothers Classic Holiday Collection, Vol. 2)
Warner Home Entertainment

Greetings! Paul Baack of the James Bond website Her Majesty's Secret Servant has articles about 007 and his filmic adventures. Paul wrote up my Savant article on the Live and Let Die Blu-ray; check out his site and blog at this link. I've also been updating the 2008 Savant Wish List regularly, so don't forget that feature either. Thanks for reading! Glenn Erickson

Greetings! Savant's new reviews today are

Live and Let Die
Blu-ray
MGM - Fox

Missing
Criterion

and
The World Sinks Except Japan
Synapse

By Wednesday we'll hopefully have a new President-Elect .... ending a process that seems to have been going on forever. May your favored candidate win!

Also, today is street date for Sony's new Budd Boetticher Box Set, which may end up as Savant's favorite disc of the year. Helping to inform and entertain us about the great director is Dick Dinman whose DVD Classics Corner on the Air web radio programs are always welcome. The latest show is called Randy Rides Again; Dick interviews actor Michael Dante (who costarred with Scott in Westbound, directed by Boetticher) and Grover Crisp, VP of Restoration at Sony. All of Dick Dinman's newest radio shows can be audited at WMPG.org by highlighting the "Archive" section. --- Thanks for reading! Glenn Erickson