Random DVD and Blu-ray announcements

Started by wilder, November 01, 2011, 01:54:56 AM

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wilder

September 13, 2016

Standard edition of Dario Argento's Tenebrae (1982) from Synapse



Tenebrae (1982) - Amazon



wilder

FUCK. YES.

October 4, 2016

"Miami Vice" (1984-1990) from Mill Creek



Miami Vice - The Complete Series - Amazon





Watch Matt Zoller Sietz's video essay on "Miami Vice", the first part of his 5-part video essay 'Zen Pulp' on Michael Mann, here

(parts 2 through 5 are linked in the sidebar)

wilder

2017 TBD

Toshio Matsumoto's Funeral Parade of Roses (1969) on blu-ray from Cinelicious Pics



A loose adaptation of Oedipus Rex set in the underground gay counterculture of 1960s Tokyo. Cross-dressing club-kid Eddie (played by real-life transvestite entertainer extraordinaire Peter, famed for his role as Kyoami the Fool in Akira Kurosawa's Ran) vies with a rival drag-queen for the favours of drug-dealing cabaret-manager Gonda. Passions escalate and blood begins to flow — before all tensions are released in a jolting climax that prefigures by nearly thirty years Tsai Ming-liang's similarly scandalous The River.

An important work of the Japanese New Wave, Funeral Parade of Roses combines elements of arthouse, documentary and experimental cinema. The film was a major influence on Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971).




wilder

#573
October 11, 2016

Leslie Stevens' Private Property (1960) on blu-ray from Cinelicious Pics, from a new 4K restoration, limited to 3,000 copies









Private Property begins as two homicidal Southern California drifters wander off the beach and into the seemingly-perfect Beverly Hills home of an unhappy housewife. Shimmering with sexual tension and lensed in stunning black and white by master cameraman Ted McCord, 'Private Property' is both an eerie, neo-Hitchcockian thriller and a savage critique of the hollowness of the Playboy-era American Dream. Long thought lost, Stevens' grim exposé of gender roles and sexual psychopathy may be the missing link in noir's transition to the sixties.

Private Property (1960) - Amazon





Leslie Stevens' Private Property (1960): Noir's Edge of Wetness - Bright Lights Film Journal

Quote from: Bright Lights Film JournalLike fellow late-phase noir auteur Paul Wendkos, writer-director-producer Leslie Stevens was an acolyte of Orson Welles — and no career path could be more dangerously vertiginous than one that emulated film's most notorious outcast. Both men would eventually succumb to the studio system that they so flamboyantly spurned in their early, impetuous days, but before they were torn from their Wellesian womb they each produced a singular film with sinuous overtones of overripe, forbidden fruit.

Of the two, however, Stevens was the more extreme — pushing beyond the Oedipal indirections that Wendkos explored in The Burglar (1957, filmed in 1955), an incendiary, overheated caper film starring Dan Duryea and Jayne Mansfield, based on the David Goodis novel of the same name. More extreme, in that Stevens plunged head-on into the hidden injuries of gender relations in postwar America, at a time when paternalism was reaching its giddy peak — and more original, in that Stevens aspired to the same level of control over his production that Welles had always sought.

Stevens' contribution to the noir nether regions that began to sprout like unwelcome weeds in the late '50s — when films were still constrained from even a rudimentary display of sexual explicitness — has long been considered a lost film. Its recent discovery, languishing in plain sight at a well-known university film archive, is a deliciously wanton metaphor for the type of secrets and taboos that were on the cusp of being exploded out into the open as the twentieth century's most tumultuous decade — the sixties — was being birthed.



Leslie Stevens also made the extremely unique Incubus (1966), shot by Conrad Hall





Quote from: Bret FetzerThis black and white horror movie, filmed in California but with dialogue in Esperanto, is unlike anything you've ever seen. Incubus inverts the usual moral battle of a good person tempted by evil. When a headstrong, blond, young succubus named Kia (Allyson Ames) becomes bored with luring the corrupt and sinful to their ultimate demise, she decides she's going to tackle a truly good man (in the form of a very young William Shatner, of all people). An older, wiser succubus warns Kia that the good have an uncanny power called love, but Kia recklessly dives in, confident in her seductive powers--until she finds herself spiritually defiled by goodness and must summon an incubus (Milos Milos) to enact revenge. The pacing is slow but eerily effective, as are the stark cinematography and low-budget effects. Shatner's intonations are just as distinctive in Esperanto as in English, but that only adds to the movie's overall stylization. Incubus shares a kinship with Carnival of Souls, another low-budget black and white horror film that has more going on than buckets of gore. Though Incubus would seem to be heavily influenced by Ingmar Bergman, director Leslie Stevens has said he was more affected by Japanese samurai films. A strikingly unique and beautifully creepy film.



wilder

Olive Films is introducing a new line, Olive Signature, which will be special edition releases of some of their films, presumably from new masters.

September 20, 2016

Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar (1954), from a new 4K restoration



-Mastered from new 4K restoration
-Introduction by Martin Scorsese
-Audio commentary with historian and critic Geoff Andrew
-"Tell Us She Was One of You: The Blacklist History of Johnny Guitar" - with historian Larry Ceplair and blacklisted screenwriter Walter Bernstein
-"Is Johnny Guitar a Feminist Western?: Questioning the Canon" - with critics Miriam Bale, Kent Jones, Joe McElhaney and B. Ruby Rich
-"Free Republic: The Story of Herb Yates and Republic studios" - with archivist Marc Wanamaker
-A critical appreciation of Nicholas Ray with critics Miriam Bale, Kent Jones, Joe McElhaney and B. Ruby Rich
-"My Friend, the American Friend" - Nicholas Ray biographical piece with Tom Farrell
-"Johnny Guitar: The First Existential Western" - an original essay by critic Jonathan Rosenbaum
-Theatrical Trailer

Johnny Guitar (1954) - Amazon







Orson Welles' Macbeth (1948) was also recently given a 2K restoration, so there's a possibility that that's in the pipeline to replace their old release. The 2K restored version is currently available from Carlotta in France.


September 27, 2016

Kamikaze '89 (1982) on blu-ray from Film Movement



In a totalitarian society of the future, in which the government controls all facets of the media, a homicide detective investigates a string of bombings, and finds out more than he bargained for.

Kamikaze '89 (1982) - Amazon



wilder

October 25, 2016

Claude Miller's Garde à Vue aka The Grilling (1981) on blu-ray from TF1 (France)



Inspector Gallien is investigating the rape and murder of two little girls. The only suspect is attorney Jerome Martinaud, but the evidence against him is circumstantial. As the city celebrates New Year's Eve, Gallien calls Martinaud to his office and interrogates him for hour after hour while Martinaud continues to maintain his innocence. We learn all about the evidence; we meet Martinaud's wife and learn all about the rift between the two; but will we, and Gallien, finally learn whether Martinaud is guilty?

The Grilling (1981) - Amazon France


















Claude Miller's Mortelle Randonnée aka Deadly Circuit (1983) on blu-ray from TF1 (France)



Catherine (Isabelle Adjani) is a seductive predator - a serial killer who lures wealthy men to their death. Beauvoir (Michel Serrault), a solitary detective known as "The Eye," is in pursuit. Convinced she is his long-lost daughter, he shadows her through Europe, concealing incriminating evidence and helping her elude the police. But when Catherine falls in love with a blind artist (Sami Frey), Beauvoir's jealousy leads to a fatal accident, which ones again sets her on a murderous path.

Deadly Circuit (1983) - Amazon France









wilder

September 19, 2016

Billy Wilder's Fedora (1978) from Masters of Cinema



Down-on-his-luck Hollywood producer Barry 'Dutch' Detweiler attempts to lure Fedora, a famous but reclusive film actress, out of retirement.

Fedora (1978) - Amazon UK






September 27, 2016

John Landis' An American Werewolf in London (1981) 35th Anniversary blu-ray, from a new restoration



Two American college students on a walking tour of Britain are attacked by a werewolf that none of the locals will admit exists.

An American Werewolf in London (1981) - Amazon




wilder

September 6, 2016

Abel Ferrara's The Funeral (1996) on blu-ray from Blaq Out (France)



New York City, the 1930s. A powerful crime family is caught in a lethal crossfire between union organizers and brutal corporate bosses. Against this turbulent backdrop, the family's three street-hardened brothers and the women they love are about to be plunged into a deadly confrontation with their enemies, with each other, and with their own dark heritage of violence, madness and murder.

The Funeral (1996) - Amazon France

Such a sick cast - Christopher Walken, Vincent Gallo, Benicio Del Toro, Chris Penn, and Isabella Rossellini



wilder

#578
November 22, 2016

David Cronenberg's Rabid (1977) on blu-ray from Scream Factory



A young woman develops a taste for human blood after undergoing experimental plastic surgery, and her victims turn into rabid, blood-thirsty zombies who proceed to infect others, which turns into a city-wide epidemic.

Rabid (1977) - Amazon






Narciso Ibáñez Serrador's 70mm The House That Screamed (1969) on blu-ray from Scream Factory



Mrs. Fourneau owns and runs a school for wayward girls in France. Her absolute discipline has fostered a social order among the girls with rampant sex, lesbianism and torture the norm. Mrs. Fourneau also has an adolescent son she tries to keep isolated from the young women lest he be tainted by sexual relations; she explains that he must wait for a girl "just like his mother". Meanwhile, girls are "running away" (being murdered) one by one, with their corpses and any evidence of their outcome not to be found...

The House That Screamed (1969) - Amazon





wilder

Q1 2017 TBD

James Cameron's The Abyss (1989) on bu-ray from a 4K scan of the original negative



A civilian diving team is enlisted to search for a lost nuclear submarine and face danger while encountering an alien aquatic species.



wilder

2016 TBD

Tom DeSimone's The Concrete Jungle (1982) on blu-ray from Code Red



When her slimy boyfriend Danny (Peter Brown) uses his unsuspecting girlfriend Elizabeth (Tracy Bregman) to carry a stash of cocaine in her skis, she is nabbed by airport security. After a speedy trial, she is sent to the Correctional Institution for Women in California. There she learns quickly that she must toughen up if she hopes to leave there in one piece. She also eventually finds that the warden (Jill St John) is not only cruel and unsympathetic, but in cahoots with an inmate Cat (Barbara Luna) the prison's Queen Bee, who is her partner in a prison drug and prostitution racket. When Elizabeth witnesses a murder committed by Cat and her henchwomen, she spurns her attentions and becomes her enemy. Meanwhile, Deputy Director Shelly Meyers (Nita Talbot), aware of the drug and prostitution business run by the warden and Cat, also suspects that Elizabeth has knowledge that could help her convict the villains, and she begins to press her for information.



wilder

September 19, 2016

The Almodóvar Collection on blu-ray from Studio Canal (UK)



The Almodóvar Collection - Amazon UK


Contains:

Dark Habits (1983)

In a convent in Madrid a band of nuns called the Humble Redeemers practice their particular brand of the Catholic Religion under their motto, 'Sin Is Our Chosen Path'. Yolanda, a nightclub singer, witnesses her boyfriend die from an overdose, and with the police out to question her, she decides to take refuge with the nuns. The convent specializes in the salvation of murderesses, but their benefactor has stopped coming up with the money, and, fearful that they may have to sell the place, the nuns welcome Yolanda. Yolanda encounters an unusual religious life: a heroin-addicted lesbian Mother Superior, a soft porn writing nun, another into acid and one who wrestles tigers. Starring Carmen Maura, Christina S. Pascual, Julieta Serrano, and Chus Lampreave.


What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1984)

Early Almodovar black comedy, less farcical and melodramatic than his later works and much more of a social critique. Carmen Maura is Gloria, the embattled Spanish housewife trying to cope with her family in a tiny apartment. Her two sons have become drug addicts and taken to dealing, her taxi-driver husband is totally indifferent to her plight, her grouchy mother-in-law keeps a pet lizard and her friend and neighbour wants her to help in her prostitution service. Starring Carmen Maura, Gonzalo Suárez, Luis Hostalot, Ryo Hiruma, and Ángel de Andrés López.


Law of Desire (1987)

Set against the backdrop of mad, mad Madrid, this film swirls around an outrageous cast of characters. Our hero is absorbed in a cat-and-mouse game of obsessive love which before long entangles his trans-sexual brother/sister, a father/son detective team and a mother who makes the Spider Woman look tame. Almodovar brilliantly examines the idea and the attractions of absolute desire in this hilarious film. Starring Eusebio Poncela, Carmen Maura, Antonio Banderas, Miguel Molina, and Manuela Velasco.


Women On The Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988)

Pedro Almodovar directs this fast-moving, surreal farce of obsessive love. When Ivan jilts his long-time lover Pepa, she considers suicide, laces her gazpacho soup with barbituates and lets her flat. However, the tenants turn out to be Ivan's son and his girlfriend. Revelations pile up, weirder and weirder characters appear and meanwhile Ivan is flying off to Stockholm with yet another young girl. Starring Carmen Maura, Antonio Banderas, Fernando Guillén, Julieta Serrano, and Maria Barranco.


Kika (1993)

Black comedy from Pedro Almodovar about a make-up artist and her relationship with a philandering American writer living in Madrid. Features the usual roster of Almodovar comic stalwarts such as a rapist-thief, a narcoleptic son, a roving camerawoman voyeur, a lesbian housemaid and various transexuals, serial killers, porn stars and drug addicts - all whisked up into a gloriously immoral frothy sex comedy. Starring Peter Coyote, Verónica Forqué, Victoria Abril, Àlex Casanovas, and Rossy de Palma.


The Flower of My Secret (1995)

A woman who lives a double life finds that being a successful romantic novelist does not necessarily bring happiness. Her husband does not love her, her best friend seems distracted and her mother and sister are too busy bickering to notice that anything is wrong. She stops writing and finds solace in the bottle but finds an unlikely rescuer putting her on a collision course to a new emotional entanglement. Starring Marissa Paredes, Juan Echanove, Carmen Elias, Rossy De Palma, and Chus Lampreave.



Supposedly all coming from Criterion at some point, along with most of the rest of his filmography.

wilder

October 11, 2016

Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) from Lionsgate



An examination of the machinations behind the scenes at a real estate office.

Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) - Amazon



wilder

October 11, 2016

Takeshi Kitano's Boiling Point (1990) on blu-ray from Film Movement



Two disquieted junior baseball players seek revenge on the local yakuza for attacking their coach.

Boiling Point (1990) - Amazon



wilder

September 7, 2016

Sidney Lumet's Fail-Safe (1964) from Via Vision Entertainment (Australia)



American planes are sent to deliver a nuclear attack on Moscow, but it's a mistake due to an electrical malfunction. Can all-out war be averted?