La haine – Blu-ray
Mathieu Kassovitz (The Crimson Rivers) took the film world by storm with La haine (Hate), a gritty, unsettling, and visually explosive look at racial and cultural volatility in modern-day France, specifically the low-income banlieues on Paris’s outskirts. Aimlessly passing their days in the concrete environs of their dead-end suburbia, Vinz (Irreversible’s Vincent Cassel), Hubert (The Constant Gardener’s Hubert Koundé), and Saïd (Three Kings’ Saïd Taghmaoui)—white, black, and Arab—give human faces to France’s immigrant and otherwise marginalized populations, their resentment at their situation simmering until it reaches a boiling point. A work of tough beauty, La haine is a landmark of contemporary French cinema and a gripping reflection of its country’s ongoing identity crisis.
1995 • 97 minutes • Black & White • 5.1 surround • In French with English subtitles • 1.85:1 aspect ratio
DIRECTOR-APPROVED BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
• Restored high-definition digital transfer, supervised by director Mathieu Kassovitz, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
• English-language audio commentary by Kassovitz
• Introduction by actor Jodie Foster
• Ten Years of “La haine,” an eighty-minute documentary that brings together cast and crew a decade after the film’s landmark release
• Featurette on the film’s banlieue setting, including interviews with sociologists Sophie Body-Gendrot, Jeffrey Fagan, and William Kornblum
• Production footage
• Deleted and extended scenes, each featuring an afterword by Kassovitz
• Gallery of behind-the-scenes photos
• Trailers
• PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by film scholar Ginette Vincendeau and a 2006 appreciation by acclaimed filmmaker Costa-Gavras
Being John Malkovich – Blu-ray
Have you ever wanted to be someone else? Or, more specifically, have you ever wanted to crawl through a portal hidden in an anonymous office building and thereby enter the cerebral cortex of John Malkovich for fifteen minutes before being spat out on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike? Then director Spike Jonze (Adaptation) and writer Charlie Kaufman (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) have the movie for you. Melancholy marionettes, office drudgery, a frizzy-haired Cameron Diaz (There’s Something About Mary)—but that’s not all! Surrealism, possession, John Cusack (Say Anything), a domesticated primate, Freud, Catherine Keener (Capote), non sequiturs, and absolutely no romance! But wait: get your Being John Malkovich now and we’ll throw in emasculation, slapstick, Abelard and Heloise, and extra Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich.
1999 • 113 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • 1.85:1 aspect ratio
DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
• New high-definition digital restoration, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
• New selected-scene audio commentary featuring filmmaker Michel Gondry
• New behind-the-scenes documentary by filmmaker Lance Bangs
• Conversation between John Malkovich and humorist John Hodgman
• Director Spike Jonze discusses Being John Malkovich via photos from its production
• Two films within the film: 7½ Floor Orientation and “American Arts & Culture” Presents John Horatio Malkovich, “Dance of Despair and Disillusionment”
• An Intimate Portrait of the Art of Puppeteering, a documentary by Bangs
• Trailer and TV spots
• PLUS: A booklet featuring a conversation between Jonze and pop-culture critic Perkus Tooth
TITLE: Being John Malkovich (BLU-RAY EDITION)
CAT. NO: CC2142BD
UPC: 7-15515-09531-0
ISBN: 978-1-60465-586-5
SRP: $39.95
STREET: 5/15/12
Certified Copy – Blu-ray
The great Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami (Close-up) travels to Tuscany for a luminous and provocative romance in which nothing is as it appears. What seems at first to be a straightforward tale of two people—played by Oscar-winning actress Juliette Binoche (Blue) and opera singer William Shimell—getting to know each other over the course of an afternoon gradually reveals itself as something richer, stranger, and trickier: a mind-bending reflection on authenticity, in art as well as in relationships. Both cerebrally and emotionally engaging, Certified Copy (Copie conforme) reminds us that love itself is an enigma.
2010 • 106 minutes • Color • 5.1 surround • In English, French, and Italian with English subtitles • 1.85:1 aspect ratio
DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
• New high-definition digital restoration, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
• New interview with director Abbas Kiarostami
• Let’s See “Copia conforme,” an Italian documentary on the making of Certified Copy, featuring interviews with Kiarostami and actors Juliette Binoche and William Shimell
• Trailer
• New English subtitle translation
• PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by film critic Godfrey Cheshire
TITLE: Certified Copy (BLU-RAY EDITION)
CAT. NO: CC2146BD
UPC: 7-15515-09491-7
ISBN: 978-1-60465-575-9
SRP: $39.95
STREET: 5/22/12
Summer Interlude – Blu-ray
Touching on many of the themes that would define the rest of his legendary career—isolation, performance, the inescapability of the past—the tenth film by Ingmar Bergman (The Seventh Seal) was a gentle sway toward true mastery. In one of the director’s great early female roles, Maj-Britt Nilsson (To Joy) beguiles as Marie, an accomplished ballet dancer haunted by her tragic youthful affair with a
shy, handsome student (Thirst’s Birger Malmsten). Her memories of the rocky shores of Stockholm’s outer archipelago mingle with scenes from her gloomy present, most of them set in the dark backstage environs of the theater where she works. A film that the director considered a creative turning point, Summer Interlude is a reverie on life and death that bridges the gap between Bergman’s past and future, theater and cinema.
1951 • 96 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • In Swedish with English subtitles • 1.33:1 aspect ratio
SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
• New high-definition digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
• New English subtitle translation
• PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by film scholar Peter Cowie
TITLE: Summer Interlude (BLU-RAY EDITION)
CAT. NO: CC2148BD
UPC: 7-15515-09571-6
ISBN: 978-1-60465-590-2
SRP: $29.95
PREBOOK: 5/01/12
STREET: 5/29/12
Summer With Monika – Blu-ray
Inspired by the earthy eroticism of his muse Harriet Andersson (Through a Glass Darkly), in the first of her many roles for him, Ingmar Bergman (Wild Strawberries) had a major international breakthrough with this ravaging, sensual tale of young love. In Stockholm, a girl (Andersson) and boy (The Magician’s Lars Ekborg) from working-class families run away from home to spend a secluded, romantic summer at the beach, far from parents and responsibilities. Inevitably, it is not long before the pair is forced to return to reality. The version originally released in the U.S. was reedited by its distributor into something more salacious, but the original Summer with Monika, as presented here, is a work of stunning maturity and one of Bergman’s most important films.
1953 • 97 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • In Swedish with English subtitles • 1.40:1 aspect ratio
SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
• New high-definition digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
• Introduction by director Ingmar Bergman
• New interview with actress Harriet Andersson, conducted by film critic Peter Cowie
• New interview with film scholar Eric Schaefer about Kroger Babb and Babb’s distribution of Monika: Story of a Bad Girl as an exploitation film
• Images from the Playground, a half-hour documentary by Stig Björkman with behind-the-scenes footage shot by Bergman, archival audio interviews with Bergman, and new interviews with actresses Bibi Andersson and Harriet Andersson
• Trailer
• New English subtitle translation
• PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by film scholar Laura Hubner, a 1958 review by filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, and a publicity piece from 1953 in which Bergman interviews himself
TITLE: Summer with Monika (BLU-RAY EDITION)
CAT. NO: CC2150BD
UPC: 7-15515-09591-4
ISBN: 978-1-60465-592-6
SRP: $39.95
STREET: 5/29/12
Eclipse Series 33: Up All Night with Robert Downey Sr.– DVD
Rarely do landmark works of cinema seem so . . . wrong. Robert Downey Sr. emerged as one of the most irreverent filmmakers of the new American underground of the early sixties, taking no prisoners in his rough-and-tumble treatises on politics, race, and consumer culture. In his most famous, the midnight-movie mainstay Putney Swope, an advertising agency is turned on its head when a militant African American man takes charge. Like Swope, Downey held nothing sacred. This selection of five of his most raucous and outlandish films, dating from 1964 to 1975, offers a unique mix of the hilariously abrasive and the intensely experimental.
TWO-DVD BOX SET INCLUDES:
Babo 73
Taylor Mead plays the president of the United Status, who conducts his top-secret international affairs on a deserted beach when he isn’t at the White House (a dilapidated Victorian), in Robert Downey Sr.’s political satire. Downey’s first feature is a rollicking, slapstick, ultra-low-budget 16 mm comedy experiment that introduced a twisted new voice to the American underground scene.
1964 • 56 minutes • Black & White/Color • Monaural • 1.33:1 aspect ratio
Chafed Elbows
This bad-taste riot was a breakthrough for Robert Downey Sr., thanks to rave notices. Visualized largely in still 35 mm photographs, it follows a shiftless downtown Manhattanite having his “annual November breakdown,” wandering from one odd job to the next, and encountering all sorts of sordid types, from desperate low-budget filmmakers to destitute dirty-sock sniffers. And there are incest, murder, and bad pop songs—something to offend everyone.
1966 • 58 minutes • Black & White/Color • Monaural • 1.33:1 aspect ratio
No More Excuses
Robert Downey Sr. takes his camera and microphone onto the streets (and into some bedrooms) for a close look at Manhattan’s swinging singles scene of the late sixties. Of course, that’s not all: No More Excuses cuts between this footage and the fragmented tale of a time-traveling Civil War soldier, a rant from the director of the fictional Society for Indecency to Naked Animals, and other assorted improprieties.
1968 • 48 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • 1.33:1 aspect ratio
Putney Swope
The most popular film by Robert Downey Sr. is this oddball classic about the antics that ensue after Putney Swope (Arnold Johnson, his voice dubbed by a gravelly Downey), the token black man on the board of a Madison Avenue advertising agency, is inadvertently elected chairman. Putney summarily fires all the whiteys, replaces them with Black Power apostles, renames the company Truth and Soul, Inc., and proceeds to wreak politically incorrect havoc.
1969 • 85 minutes • Black & White/Color • Monaural • 1.77:1 aspect ratio
Two Tons of Turquoise to Taos Tonight
“A film without a beginning or an end,” in Robert Downey Sr.’s words, this Dadaist thingamajig—a never-before-seen, newly reedited version of the director’s 1975 release Moment to Moment (also known as Jive)—is a cascade of curious sketches, scenes, and shots that takes on a rhythmic life. It stars Downey’s wife, Elsie, in an endless succession of off-the-wall roles, from dancer to cocaine fiend.
1975 • 56 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • 1.33:1 aspect ratio
TITLE: Eclipse Series 33: Up All Night with Robert Downey Sr.
CAT. NO: ECL152
UPC: 7-15515-09611-9
ISBN: 978-1-60465-594-0
SRP: $39.95
STREET: 5/22/12
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Attention Canada: Certified Copy is a US only release. Bergman titles are English-speaking Canada only. All other titles are available in all of Canada.
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