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Greetings! Got some fun links here ... Remember I was talking about The Informant! last time around? Correspondent Edward Sullivan forwards a link to a This American Life radio docu about the true Mark Whitacre / Archer Daniels Midland case on which the movie was based. It's very good.

Correspondent Shaun K. Chang sends along a YouTube link to a featurette for the new Code Red disc release of the legendary Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck horror film Messiah of Evil, which looks like a cross between Night of the Living Dead and Antonioni's L'eclisse. I've been hearing about this one ever since UCLA film school ... and even tried to see it at a downtown L.A. grindhouse around 1974 or so. No luck.

Gary Teetzel points us to an already much-viewed YouTube montage of "the biggest cliche of contemporary horror films--the non-working cell phone. The montage has a point ... in almost any contemporary drama, cell phones have to be "neutralized" before any character can truly be cut off from friends or assistance-providers, and it always seems contrived. Instant, constant, never absent personal communication is cheapening movies, the same way they're cheapening a certain strata of human interaction.

I've just gotten in screeners of The Gate, Stop Making Sense (in Blu-ray) and the elusive The Exiles, as well as a few more Warner Archives titles. I also finally got Criterion's The Last Days of Disco, which turned out to be a great picture, insightful and funny ... Thanks for reading! Glenn Erickson

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Greetings! Sony just sent out an official flyer for their Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics Volume I collection, coming November 3, which contains The Big Heat as well as new releases of some of their best noir titles: The Sniper (1952), 5 Against the House (1955), Murder By Contract (1958), and The Lineup (1958). It's a great selection that taps into an under-screened group of hardboiled directors like Don Siegel and Phil Karlson. Every film here carries the seed idea of a modern sub-genre -- Murder By Contract and The Lineup are trendsetters about emotionless hit men. It's also great to see stars in some of their earliest screen performances, like Kim Novak, Vince Edwards and Eli Wallach. In a year marked by studios retreating from library releases, Sony is to be applauded for tapping into some of their best classic titles.

Fellow Moody Blues fan Wayne Schmidt steers me toward a page by Mike Dickson devoted to the unusual musical instrument called the mellotron. It includes a number of sample recordings that help explain the weird device; it's fascinating.

I caught a screening of The Informant! the other night. It's one of Steven Soderbergh's better pictures. Matt Damon's unusual performance reminds me of William H. Macy in Fargo except that he's the whole show. A sleazy chronic liar who lets down everyone around him (and the audience) time and again, Damon's character evolves from likeable patsy, to "his own worst enemy" to a destructive social menace. He's a new kind of screen psycho, so depressingly credible (he's based on a real weasel) that the only sane response is despair. Although Marvin Hamlisch's music is appropriate for an early Woody Allen movie, and a number of stand-up comics appear in supporting roles, this is a serious drama given the superficial trappings of comedy. We can laugh but the joke's really on us. Thanks for reading! Glenn Erickson

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Greetings! It'll probably be taken down before you get a chance to read this, but Dr. Horrible's surprise appearance on Sunday's Emmy Show is up on YouTube ...

Dick Dinman's DVD Classics of the Air this week has an interview with Eleanor Parker in which she goes into detail about her favorite and least favorite leading men: Gable, Flynn (twice), Bogart, Sinatra (twice), Mitchum, Kirk Douglas, Heston, MacMurray, and others. Parker also reveals the identity of a leading male co-star she despised and why. I'm getting positive email feedback on Dick's web radio shows and am happy to give them a solid plug.

It's time for some of the studios' Halloween-themed genre DVDs to start showing up, so I hope to be reviewing one next time around ... Thanks for reading, Glenn Erickson.

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Greetings! Correspondent Mike Hernandez sends a link to an impressive trio of fake retro-rigged trailers that rework old B&W sources to represent Raiders of the Lost Ark, Ghostbusters and Forrest Gump as they might have been advertised in the 1940s and 50s. Very funny and very clever. The talent behind them is Ivan Guerrero.

AnimEigo has announced the R1 DVD release in November of the first four films in the Japanese Tora-san series. It's the longest running film series starring the same actor, Kiyoshi Atsumi. The positive-thinking salesman Tora-san finds a prospective girl friend in each film, but in each case she falls for someone else. Immensely popular in Japan, the hope is that these comedy-dramas will catch on here. The first set will carry a commentary by Stuart Galbraith IV and essays by Donald Richie, Michael Jeck, Kevin Thomas, and Alexander Jacoby.

I've just got in Away We Go from Universal and have acquired several more Warner Archive Collection discs for ree-vyoo purposes. I'm also getting emails from anxious readers asking if I've received Blu-rays of Snow White, The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind yet. I've certainly put in for them but will just have to see. Paramount is for some reason slow shipping screeners of their Deep Impact Blu-ray ... I'm sure it's not their fault. One's favorites are never the ones that come early, ya know what I mean? Thanks for reading, Glenn Erickson

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Greetings! It's fun reviewing another good Hammer film this week, and interesting that Craig Reardon should send in this nice link to a two-part English TV interview with Peter Cushing, taped around the time that Young Sherlock Holmes came out. Mr. Cushing is camera-ready for the studio audience and in a fine mood; it's too bad that he's there as Britain's favorite Sherlock Holmes in support of the younger actor in the new film. But what a good egg -- when the kid poses with a pipe in his mouth, Cushing gives him a round of applause instead of rolling his eyes.

Looks like Roger Corman is getting an Honorary Oscar ... as reported at THR.com.

I'm getting lots of mail about the new Gojira Blu-ray but my review won't be out until next Friday or so. The news ain't good ... from what I saw, other websites' low opinions about the HD disc are more than justified. See you then, thanks for reading! Glenn Erickson

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Greetings! I feel strangely compelled to link to Edward Holub Jr.'s latest oddball short subject, a Dinky Di Dog Food Commercial hosted by James Stewart (sort of). It's just strange enough to ... ?

Some nice feedback came in about my Die Walküre and M*A*S*H reviews, notes that I have amended to the reviews themselves. Other online sites have good things to say about the audio for a new Canadian Blu-ray of A Hard Day's Night, but haven't been as generous with the new BD of the original Gojira. I did get in a screener for the Japanese movie, so will be reviewing it fairly quickly.

I know I'm probably the last person to do so, but I saw Inglourious Basterds at an Editor's Guild screening last night and thought it was terrific. The gore that got the mainstream press acting like ninnie comprises all of 45 seconds or so, and I found nothing offensive about the Jewish angle. What did impress me is that Tarantino has aimed his pulp radar at something worth examining, the subgenre of the escapist war movie. All of the exaggerations and ridiculousness seemed perfectly judged to me as exactly the kind of thing viewers really hope for in movies like The Dirty Dozen (which Inglourious more or less replays), like the infantile daydream of rewriting history to allow one to kill Hitler personally.

The contradictions of the escapist war movie are all there. And the movie-in-a-movie about the Nazis making a nasty 'Kill Yankees' morale booster movie is nothing short of brilliant. It's party propaganda versus fierce independent protest. In the end Hitler is destroyed by the power of pure KINO, the ultimate in radical underground filmmaking. The German Sergeant York and the Avenging Heroine share a violent finish like lovers at the end of a King Vidor movie. Tarantino does the best Leone imitation around but also gets incredible mileage from what are really a handful of very small-scale scenes. I was told that Inglourious is a make-or-break picture for the Weinstein company, so I'm glad it's doing better than just reasonably well. Thanks for reading! -- Glenn Erickson

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Greetings! Let's see what's new here. Warners just sent me three more of their Turner Classic Movies Greatest Classic Films sets, an ongoing reissue of titles grouped in fours at a bargain price. New releases would be more exciting but there's no denying that these sets do concentrate a lot of quality in a compact package. The three boxes this time are Murder Mysteries (The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, Dial M for Murder and The Postman Always Rings Twice), Horror (House of Wax, The Haunting, Freaks and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941)) and Sci-Fi (2001: A Space Odyssey, Soylent Green, Forbidden Planet and The Time Machine). In all cases the transfers are the best available, often from earlier special editions. The extras are whatever were encoded on the same disc when originally released. If you look up the individual titles in the Savant Review Index, you'll see that I've written up almost all of them.

Online radio host Dick Dinman has a great interview guest star this week for his DVD Classics of the Air show, Gena Rowlands. Ms. Rowlands, Michael Douglas and Steven Spielberg all comment on what they think is Kirk Douglas's best film, Lonely Are the Brave.

Thanks for reading! Glenn Erickson

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3000!

Greetings! With today's reviews DVD Savant passes a milestone -- 3000 reviews and articles officially added to the site since July 1997, when it was called MGM Video Savant. That number is neither here nor there but I take it personally just the same. Obviously I enjoy this and I've met enough interesting people through the site's Email to make it all worthwhile.

This Labor Day weekend is also the big Cinecon weekend, as old college friend, co-editor, author and now President of the Cinecom Foundation Robert S. Birchard informs me. The several big nights of rare screenings will be held at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood. Full information is at this handy website. It actually started on September 3, so if you live in the L.A. area. you might want to check out the website right away.

What else is interesting news? Kino is releasing a Blu-ray of Buster Keaton's The General on November 10; as the show looks fantastic in 35mm I'm angling to snag a review copy. Warner Archives has added some attractive Noir titles that I'm hoping to cover sooner than later, including the weird Barry Sullivan thriller Suspense that doesn't get shown much any more. I've seen pieces of From Hell It Came and She (1965) and I want to review them as well.

My enthusiasm for the German Bronston Blu-rays of El Cid and The Fall of the Roman Empire is something of a bust, as the discs are going to be locked into the European region code. Well, schnitzel to that! We're out of luck over here, at least until the Weinsteins see fit to spring for domestic releases.

The Columbia Classics Blog has made a very welcome announcement: next year sometime will come an Icons of Suspense: Hammer set, which will include Stop Me Before I Kill, Cash on Demand, Never Take Candy from a Stranger, Maniac, The Snorkel and the superb Science Fiction, uh, supense thriller These Are The Damned, a movie Savant can drone on about forever discuss for hours!

Thanks for reading! Glenn Erickson