May 23, 2006

Dispatch #134

This week's Dispatch travels through time to bring you the latest news from the future, and past, of film.

#134 | May 23, 2006


"It's some kind of invisible barrier."
"Oh, so that's what an invisible barrier looks like." -- Time Bandits.

Now playing: The GreenCine Core Set - the 250 films rated highest by GreenCine members. The list doesn't need much more of an explanation than that, but it's a great place to start if you're new to GreenCine or just looking to catch up on the DVDs your fellow GreenCiners love. We'll be doing more varieties of these sorts of lists soon. But for now, use this one to help fill up your queue!

War (huh). What is it good for? Absolutely nothing - except inspiring some pretty great movies, with The Dirty Dozen easily in the top dozen. Out now in a spanking new two-disc Special Edition, Robert Aldrich's WWII actioner has lost none of its lustre. It remains as nihilistic (anti-war and anti-everything) as war movies get, but with a terrific cast (lead by Lee Marvin, Donald Sutherland and Charles Bronson), great energy and some needed humor, the film remains a classic. The bonus disc includes the mediocre 1985 made-for-TV sequel The Dirty Dozen: Next Mission, but also two absorbing new documentaries: "Armed and Deadly: The Making of The Dirty Dozen" and "The Filthy Thirteen: Real Stories from Behind the Lines."

Buy for $20.57.

The Cecil B. DeMille Collection: Nine and a half hours of epic 30s-era Golden Age Hollywood on five discs: The Sign of the Cross (1932), with Fredric March, Charles Laughton and Claudette Colbert; Four Frightened People (1934), with Colbert; Cleopatra (1934), with Colbert again; The Crusades (1935), with Loretta Young; Union Pacific (1939), with Barbara Stanwyck and Joel McCrea. "Offers an excellent overview of this often underrated filmmaker's fine work from the 1930's," writes Dave Kehr in The New York Times.

Buy for $50.45.

Now playing via GreenCine's Video-on-Demand: Two stalwarts of Hammer Horror films - Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing - starred in the underrated Horror Express, though the film is in fact a Spanish production. "Manages to mix the bloodletting of a Spanish horror movie with the Gothic atmosphere of Hammer into a final fusion of science fiction and horror," wrote BritMovie. "With a semi-literate script by Arnaud D'Usseau and Julian Halevy, [and] Spanish director Eugenio Martin keeps it going at a rapid pace."

Watch for only $2.99 a pop.

 

More like this: Patton (Special Edition) (or previous edition for rent) | The Longest Day (Special Edition) (or previous edition for rent) More like this: Why Change Your Wife/Miss Lulu Bett | King of Kings (Criterion) More like this: Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet | Phantom from 10,000 Leagues

Two new Criterion releases and an Oscar-nominated performance highlight this week's new releases:

Harlan County USA (1976; $29.97). In this ground-breaking, Oscar-winning documentary from Barbara Kopple, "there are no after-the-fact summaries, but a persistent present tense of murder, gun threats, crowd violence, poverty, corporate usury, and in the end, astonishing communal solidarity," writes Michael Atkinson in the Village Voice. Criterion has, of course, loaded this disc with all sorts of extras to boot.

Transamerica (2005; $21.45). "If it lives on the page, it lives on the stage," Felicity Huffman told John Esther recently, explaining that it was the script that persuaded her to take a chance on Transamerica - a good move, as it scored her an Oscar nomination. "I thought it was a great story and I was glad it wasn't an 'issue' movie. You know, 'Transgender individuals are people, too.' The part... was just a fantastic opportunity and I hadn't done anything close to that on film."

Viridiana (1961; $22.46). "More than 40 years after its original release, Viridiana still shocks," writes Ed Gonzalez in Slant of this Palme d'Or-winner at Cannes. Criterion's spiffed-up package contains new video interviews with Silvia Pinal and author Richard Porton and excerpts from a 1964 episode of Cinìastes de notre temps on Luis Buñuel's early career.

Metal: A Headbanger's Journey (2005; $18.88). "Both Black Sabbath's Tony Iommi and Motörhead's [Lemmy] Kilmister pop up as the chatty elder statesmen of metal in this vicariously thrilling documentary, which seeks to explain heavy metal's many permutations (glam metal, the new wave of British heavy metal, speed metal, black metal, death metal, Norwegian death metal, ad infinitum) and its sheer endurance over the past 30-odd (sometimes very odd if you count King Diamond or Voivod) years," writes Marc Savlov in the Austin Chronicle.

Also out this week: BloodRayne Unrated Director's Cut (2006; $18.88); Back Door to Hell (1964; $10.95); The Boondock Saints Special Edition (2000; $23.45); Little Britain The Complete Second Season (2004; $27.45).

New anime: Doki Doki School Hours 4th Hour. (2004; $19.45). "While other shows use the Japanese high school as a setting for all sorts of romantic, dramatic, futuristic, horrific, and sometimes just plain soporific adventures, this is one of those oddities where school itself is the adventure," writes Carlo Santos for the Anime News Network. "[C]ute and likable."

A complete list of this week's New Releases | Coming Soon | New Releases Archive | Your Queue

 New primer alert! Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, H.G. Wells - the concept of time travel, appropriately enough, goes quite a ways back. In movies, as Jeffrey Anderson explains in his primer on time travel movies, "only one aspect of science fiction still has potential, infinite potential, and that's time travel... the variations within are endlessly fascinating." Go Back to the Future in a Time Machine with the time travel movies primer. (Captain Kirk, in Star Trek IV, at right: "Everybody remember where we parked.")

Our ever-busy film blog, GreenCine Daily, continues its non-stop coverage of the Cannes International Film Festival, which is in full swing.

Over on the discussion boards are tons of movie (and non-movie) topics just waiting for your contribution. From summer movies to anime fansubs, there's something for everyone. So don't be afraid - come join in!

 

Our list of the week is Cinenaut's Time Travel Romances list, to go in tandem with our new primer.

Our next screening at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts will be on Wednesday, June 7 as we proudly present René Clément's And Hope to Die. In one of his final roles, Robert Ryan stars as an aging criminal trying to collect on a kidnapping plot in Montreal. Jean-Louis Trintignant, Aldo Ray and an uncredited Emmanuelle Béart (in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it role) round out a remarkable cast, photographed by Edmond Richard (Welles' The Trial; Bunuel's Le Fantôme de la liberté). Legendary French auteur René Clément crafts David Goodis' "Black Friday" into a gritty, witty, unjustly little-seen neo-noir. The program includes the exceptionally rare short film The Reason Why, also starring Ryan as a conflicted man with a gun in his hand.

Wednesday, June 7, 7:30pm. YBCA, 701 Mission Street, San Francisco. $7/$5 GreenCine and YBCA Members, Students, Seniors.

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Posted by cphillips at May 23, 2006 4:10 PM