| Nude on the Moon | | Posted Tuesday, September 12, 2006 1:53:25 AM by BlogJeeves Team | | Oh, those crazy moon-hopping kids! There's something endearingly innocent about Doris Wishman's ridiculous 1960 nudie romp with a science fiction twist. The nation's most brilliant young rocket scientist decides to build his own private rocket ship to the moon with his uncle's inheritance and takes off secretly with his partner, a pipe-chomping professor. Much to their surprise, it turns out to be a lush landscape that looks suspiciously like Florida, with a nudist camp in a nearby crater stuffed with topless beauties, posed and poised and waiting for the cameras to click. "I feel like a schoolboy!" exclaims our hero. "Just remember," the professor cautions, "we're scientists." To that end, he snaps as many photos as he can before their air runs out. One of Wishman's best-looking films, it's shot in soft, luscious color, which only makes it look more like a Vargas calendar come to life. The special effects are special only by virtue of their tinselly cheapness, and a cool vibes score accompanies the moon scenes. The print is remarkably well preserved, and the disc also features a cosmic-striptease short subject and a Doris Wishman poster gallery. --Sean Axmaker... | |
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| | | The Thief of Bagdad (Deluxe Edition) | | Posted Monday, September 11, 2006 5:52:33 AM by BlogJeeves Team | | Douglas Fairbanks spared no expense for what may be the most lavish fantasy movie ever made. Inspired by the flying-carpet effects of Fritz Lang's somber but spectacular Der Müde Tod, Fairbanks (ever the canny businessman) bought the American rights, then hid the film away as he created his own show-stopping adventure, an adaptation of A Thousand and One Nights in which the magic-carpet ride was but one of many fantastic marvels. Swaggering through massive marketplace sets and cavernous throne rooms as an incorrigible thief and pickpocket, he scales towering walls (with the help of a magic rope) and leads a merry chase through crowded bazaars in his pursuit of loot--until he falls in love with the beautiful princess and vows to win her heart. This jaunty opening is but mere preamble to the spectacular second act. As three kings scour the globe to retrieve the rarest treasures known to man, the repentant thief embarks on an odyssey through caverns of fire and underwater caves. The marvelous special effects--from the smoke-belching dragon and underwater spider to the flying horse and magic armies arising from the dust--may show their seams but glow with a timeless sense of wonder. William Cameron Menzies's magnificent sets appear to have leapt from the pages of a storybook. As the adventure concludes in a torrent of movie magic that cascades nonstop through the breathless final hour, Fairbanks commands the screen with a hearty laugh and graceful athleticism, the cinema's first action hero triumphant. Kino's restored edition is tinted and features an organ score by Gaylord Carter. --Sean Axmaker ... | |
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| | | The Best of Zagreb Film: Be Careful What You Wish For/The Classic Collection | | Posted Sunday, September 10, 2006 9:57:07 AM by BlogJeeves Team | | In four decades, Zagreb Film of Yugoslavia produced 600 animated films, winning more than 400 international awards. The studio quickly became famous for a unique animation style that became known as "the Zagreb school." One of the pioneering distinctions was that its filmmakers wrote, designed, and directed their own films, resulting in boldly entertaining cartoons unified in design, tone and message. This volume includes Be Careful What You Wish For, fourteen stories of irony, double cross, and mystery. Some are hilarious, some poignant, all memorable. The Classic Collection includes seven animated films representative of Zagreb's most unique offerings.... | |
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| | | Broken Blossoms | | Posted Saturday, September 09, 2006 1:53:18 PM by BlogJeeves Team | | D.W. Griffith was many things: movie innovator, maker of grand statements (The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance being among the biggest of all silent films), the first American superstar director--the Steven Spielberg of his era. Griffith was also very much a conscious artist, a man who did not think of movies as a mere medium for entertainment but as an art form. The mute evidence of this can be found on ample display in Griffith's 1919 drama Broken Blossoms, a tragic and completely uncommercial project that proved to be hugely popular. The director's most favored leading lady, Lillian Gish, plays an adolescent girl in London's rough Limehouse district; abused by her father (Donald Crisp), a crude boxer, she is cared for by a poetic Chinese man (Richard Barthelmess). Gish, who had doubts about playing a child (and was not yet fully recovered from a brush with the deadly Spanish flu epidemic), delivers a magnificent performance. Justly famous for her hysterical meltdown while trapped in a closet, she also brings off the smaller moments: her hesitation while gazing at a flower she can't possibly afford to buy is a heartbreaking piece of pantomime. Griffith's delicacy of touch extends to matters of race, as he clearly sides with the refined man from China, who must endure the prattle of white men boasting about traveling to the Orient and converting "the heathen." Small in scale compared to Griffith's mightier projects, Broken Blossoms is nevertheless one of his most beautiful films, and a landmark of the silent era. --Robert Horton... | |
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| | | Chilling 20 Pack | | Posted Friday, September 08, 2006 5:53:21 PM by BlogJeeves Team | | The Chilling DVD 20 Movie Pack features an incredible mix of blood curdling horror classics… movies with countless hours of entertainment. Titles Include: Maniac - Starring Bill Woods, Horace Carpenter, Ted Edwards Little Shop of Horrors - Starring Jack Nicholson, Jonathan Haze, Jackie Joseph Moon of the Wolf - Starring David Janssen, Barbara Rush, Bradford Dillman House on Haunted Hill, The - Starring Vincent Price, Carol Ohmart, Richard Long Creature from the Haunted Sea - Starring Antony Carbone, Betsy Jones-Moreland, Robert Towne Tormented - Starring Richard Carlson, Susan Gordon, Lugene Sanders Dementia 13 - Starring William Campbell, Luana Anders, Bart Patton Galaxy Invader, The - Starring Richard Dyszel, Fay Tilles, Greg Dohler Phantom from 10,000 Leagues, The - Starring Kent Taylor, Cathy Downs, Michael Whalen Attack of the Monsters - Starring Nobuhiro Kajima, Miyuki Akiyama, Christopher Murphy Blood Tide - Starring James Earl Jones, Jose Ferrer, Deborah Shelton Terror, The - Starring Jack Nicholson, Boris Karloff, Sandra Knight Laser Mission - Starring Brandon Lee, Ernest Borgnine, Debi Monahan Astral Factor, The - Starring Robert Foxworth, Stephanie Powers, Elke Sommer They Came from Beyond Space - Starring Robert Hutton, Jennifer Jayne, Michael Gough Last Man on Earth, The - Starring Vincent Price, Franca Bettoia, Emma Danieli Gammera the Invincible - Starring Albert Dekker, Brian Donlevy, Diane Findlay Snowbeast - Starring Bo Svenson, Yvette Mimieux, Clint Walker Night of the Living Dead - Starring Judith O'Dea, Duane Jones, Karl Hardman Cosmos: War of the Planets - Starring John Richardson, Yanti Sommer, West Buchanan... | |
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| | | Short 2 - Dreams | | Posted Thursday, September 07, 2006 9:52:10 PM by BlogJeeves Team | | This reissue of the second release in a series of DVD anthologies of short films, like its fellow Short titles, is loosely organized around a common theme--in this case, the terrain of the subconscious. The big fish here is Chris Marker's 1962 classic, La Jetée, the forever- haunting, post-apocalyptic story of a man's descent into a time-tripping dream state, where his origins and destiny fold together in one fleeting moment at an airport. If that scenario sounds somewhat similar to a certain Terry Gilliam feature (oh, OK, it's 12 Monkeys), you're right, and Gilliam can be heard on an alternate soundtrack here talking about the challenge and fun of being "inspired by" Marker's film. (Yet another alternate soundtrack features commentary by 12 Monkeys screenwriters David and Janet Peoples.) Not surprisingly, La Jetée turns out to be a hard act to follow, and there's not much on Short 2 that even comes close to its league. Alison De Vere's 1974 animated piece, Café Bar, about a blind date at a coffee house, is more intriguing for its historical value as a "brushsticks style" of crafting images than as a work of art. Joachim Solum and Thomas Lien's watery Depth Solitude is an effectively blunt and bizarre--but ultimately obvious--fable about a pool cleaner who lives in his deep-sea-diving suit at the bottom of a public swimming facility. The best thing going for it is an English-language narration by Max Von Sydow, who unfortunately is not involved with Carmen Elly's A Guy Walks into a Bar. This competent but wearying film, about a college-bound young man (Fred Savage) who meets up with a sexy hitchhiker (Allison Moir) and finds his world changed, does not inspire thoughts of a second viewing. On the plus side, there's an interview with independent director George Hickenlooper and an accompanying, interesting bit showing us a pre-production prototype of select scenes from Hickenlooper's The Big Brass Ring. If you've seen the latter movie in its finished state (based on an original script by Orson Welles and Oja Kodar), it is startling to watch an entirely different roster of actors (including Malcolm McDowell) in roles that Hickenlooper ultimately recast with William Hurt, Nigel Hawthorne, Miranda Richardson, and Irène Jacob. --Tom Keogh... | |
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| | | Phantom | | Posted Wednesday, September 06, 2006 9:52:15 PM by BlogJeeves Team | | Flicker Alley, in partnership with the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Foundation is proud to present, Phantom, which marked a major turning point in the influential career and the groundbreaking style of cinema poet F.W. Murnau. In this beautifully reconstructed and restored edition from an amazingly detailed, original 1922 negative, Alfred Abel (Metropolis, Dr. Mabuse) plays Lorenz Lubota, a man obsessed with his own desires to achieve fame and wealth, who must confront the barriers of class keeping him from a woman (Lya de Putti)with whom he has had a fateful encounter. Featuring a magnificent new orchestral score by Robert Israel, this powerfully expressive and surprisingly insightful film is a triumph of German Weimar cinema and a wonderful collaboration of many of its most skilled artisans and recognizable performers. Through dazzling visuals and memorable characters, Phantom paints a portrait of the corrupting influence of money, the conformity of societal norms, and the redemptive power of family.... | |
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| | | Landmarks of Early Film, Vol. 2: The Magic of Melies | | Posted Monday, September 04, 2006 3:52:26 AM by BlogJeeves Team | | Decades before the term "special effects" was coined, audiences of the newborn cinema were witnessing spectacular screen illusions, courtesy of the medium's first master magician: Georges Melies. Melies' astounding employment of double exposure, makeup, editing and theatrical trickery still command the power to surprise and bewilder and can now be seen for the first time with crystal clarity in fifteen beautifully restored films, accompanied by newly composed scores. Includes the documentary "Georges Melies: Cinema Magician," plus the Melies shorts "An Impossible Voyage" (struck from an original hand-colored negative), "The Black Imp," "The Cook in Trouble," "The Living Playing Cards," and 11 more!... | |
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| | | Fritz Lang's Indian Epic | | Posted Sunday, September 03, 2006 7:52:57 AM by BlogJeeves Team | | Long dismissed as the last gasp of a great directing career, Fritz Lang's two-part saga of India needs to be rescued from cinema's dustbin. While it has clear limitations, notably the listless actors and shoddy special effects (hard to overlook the fake tiger), this opus is marked by an awesome sense of formal design, immaculate camera composition, and the creeping sense of fate messing up the characters' lives. In the first part, The Tiger of Eschnapur, we delve into the political and personal intrigue that results from a maharaja's infatuation with a temple dancer (sawed-off, sexy Debra Paget). Lang's pacing is deliberate; sometimes the movie resembles an Indiana Jones yarn slowed to a stroll. But as Lang brings the many threads together, the scheme emerges, and the crisp location shooting in India presents a storybook exoticism that, admittedly, has little to do with reality. In the second part, The Indian Tomb, a lovesick maharaja exacts his vengeance. Auteurists will recognize Lang's impeccable eye for screen space and his obsessive concern with the price of tempting fate. Even non-auteurists will appreciate the revolt of the underground leper colony and the cobra dance performed by Paget, who wears something less than a bikini. This is melodrama served up without apology by a director more interested in patterns than psychology. --Robert Horton... | |
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| | | Masters of Russian Animation - Volume 4 | | Posted Saturday, September 02, 2006 11:52:33 AM by BlogJeeves Team | | The 12 shorts in this collection were made at the Soyuzmultfilm Studio during the late '80s, shortly before the collapse of the Soviet regime ended the subsidies that had financed the studio's output since its establishment in 1936. Nina Shorina's mordant stop-motion film "Door" (1986) probably ranks as the best known work in the anthology. The outré inhabitants of a crumbling apartment house go to enormous trouble getting in and out of the building without using the front door--even after a boy demonstrates that it's unlocked. "Door" satirizes the mismanaged life Soviet citizens endured for decades, but the rest of the films draw primarily on non-Russian sources for inspiration. Natasha Golovanova's charming "Boy Is a Boy" (1986) reflects the influence of British illustrator Ronald Searle; "Liberated Don Quixote" (1987) by Vadim Kurchevsky offers backgrounds that evoke the paintings of El Greco; Mikhail Aldashin and Peep Pedmanson borrowed heavily from the Hubley Studio films "Keke" (1988). While Shorina's "Alter Ego" (1989) resembles a watered-down version of the work of Czech surrealist animator Jan Svankmajer. Although many of the films are interesting and entertaining, the studio was clearly past its prime. The viewer looks in vain for the compelling personal visions of Yuri Norstein and Fyodor Khitruk, who dominated Soyuzmultfilm during its most creative period. Complete contents: 1. "Door," 2. "Boy Is a Boy," 3. "Liberated Don Quixote," 4. "Martinko," 5. "Big Underground Ball," 6. "Cat and Clown," 7. "Dream," 8. "Kele," 9. "Alter Ego," 10. "Girlfriend," 11. "Croak x Croak," 12. "Cat and Company." Unrated, it is suitable for ages 10 and older for minor cartoon violence, grotesque imagery, and difficult themes. -- Charles Solomon... | |
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