See,I'd thought I would enjoy it, since I'm a big fan of the era, but this film just isn't appealing to me at all. I don't hate it, but it's not a film I feel the need to own or watch again. I don't regret watching it.
When I first saw Two-Lane Blacktop, it took me aback, because nothing really happens during the film in a spectacular sense. I'd like to think that I've learned to expect this from Criterion titles, but I still haven't learned, and I keep expecting conventional film sensibilities during first-time viewings. It's a pretty laid-back affair, and, when I'm in the right frame of mind, that's just what the doctor ordered.
Some films like this reverberate with me much more on subsequent viewings. On the other hand, some films (Slacker is a good example.) are so laid-back that I never really get into them.
Started the cull. I'm watching two lane blacktop now, and it's just blah and isnt appealing to me. I can see the easy rider comparisons, but then, that's ranked 5th out of the 7 films in the bbs set. For a film.about racing, it's frightfully dull.
Yeah, I haven't seen it in a while but I remember it being more esoteric and heady than thrilling. That's just me though, if you want speed try The original Italian Job or Vanishing Point.
pretty blown away that Criterion is releasing Shoah on bd.
possibly the most heartbreaking and powerful doc ever imo.
cannot wait to see it in hd.
every single person in this thread owes it to him/herself to watch it at least once.
(makes me curious in there will also be a MoC version in the near future)
Traveling to accept an honorary degree, Professor Isak Borg—masterfully played by veteran director Victor Sjöström (The Phantom Carriage)—is forced to face his past, come to terms with his faults, and make peace with the inevitability of his approaching death. Through flashbacks and fantasies, dreams and nightmares, Wild Strawberries dramatizes one man’s remarkable voyage of self-discovery. This richly humane masterpiece, full of iconic imagery, is a treasure from the golden age of art-house cinema and one of the films that catapulted Ingmar Bergman (The Seventh Seal) to international acclaim.
1957 • 92 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • In Swedish with English subtitles • 1.33:1 aspect ratio
BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
• New high-definition digital film transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
• Audio commentary by film scholar Peter Cowie
• Introduction by director Ingmar Bergman
• Ingmar Bergman on Life and Work, a ninety-minute documentary by filmmaker and author Jörn Donner
• Behind-the-scenes footage shot by Bergman
• PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by film writer Mark Le Fanu
A landmark collaboration between writer H. G. Wells (Island of Lost Souls), producer Alexander Korda (The Thief of Bagdad), and designer and director William Cameron Menzies (Gone with the Wind), Things to Come is a science fiction film like no other, a prescient political work that predicts a century of turmoil and progress. Skipping through time, Things to Come bears witness to world war, dictatorship, disease, the rise of television, and finally, utopia. Conceived, written, and overseen by Wells himself as an adaptation of his own work, this mega-budgeted production, the most ambitious ever from Korda’s London Films, is a triumph of imagination and technical audacity.
1936 • 97 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • 1.37:1 aspect ratio
SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
• New high-definition digital film restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
page 2 of 6
• Audio commentary featuring film historian and writer David Kalat
• Interview with writer and cultural historian Christopher Frayling on the film’s design
• Film historian Bruce Eder on Arthur Bliss’s musical score
• Audio recording from 1936 of a reading from H. G. Wells’s writing about the “wandering sickness,” the plague in Things to Come
• PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic Geoffrey O’Brien
• More!
TITLE: Things to Come (BLU-RAY EDITION)
CAT. NO: CC2271BD
UPC: 7-15515-10691-7
ISBN: 978-1-60465-734-0
SRP: $39.95
STREET: 6/18/13
SAFETY LAST! – Blu-Ray
The comic genius of silent star Harold Lloyd is eternal. Chaplin was the sweet innocent, Keaton the stoic outsider, but Lloyd—the modern guy striving for success—is us. And with its torrent of perfectly executed gags and astonishing stunts, Safety Last! is the perfect introduction to him. Lloyd plays a small-town bumpkin trying to make it in the big city, who finds employment as a lowly department-store clerk. He comes up with a wild publicity stunt to draw attention to the store, resulting in an incredible feat of derring-do on his part that gets him started on the climb to success. Laugh-out-loud funny and jaw-dropping in equal measure, Safety Last! is a movie experience par excellence, anchored by a genuine legend.
Safety Last! is the first Harold Lloyd film to be released by the Criterion Collection since the Lloyd catalog was acquired by Janus Films in 2012. Janus Films will tour Safety Last! theatrically starting in April to celebrate the ninetieth anniversary of its Release, and to kick off an ongoing celebration of this most contemporary of classic silent comedians.
1923 • 84 minutes • Black & White • Silent • 1.37:1 aspect ratio
SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
• New 2K digital film restoration
• Musical score by composer Carl Davis from 1989, synchronized and restored under his supervision and presented in uncompressed stereo on the Blu-ray edition
• Alternate score by organist Gaylord Carter from the late 1960s, presented in uncompressed monaural on the Blu-ray edition
• Audio commentary featuring film critic Leonard Maltin and director and Harold Lloyd archivist Richard Correll
• Introduction by Suzanne Lloyd, Lloyd’s granddaughter and president of Harold Lloyd Entertainment
• Harold Lloyd: The Third Genius, a 104-minute documentary from 1989
• Three newly restored Lloyd shorts: Take a Chance (1918), Young Mr. Jazz (1919), and His Royal Slyness (1920), with commentary by Correll and film writer John Bengtson
• Locations and Effects, a new documentary featuring Bengtson and special effects expert Craig Barron
• New interview with Davis
• PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic Ed Park
In its home country, František Vlácil’s Marketa Lazarová has been hailed as the greatest Czech film ever made; for many U.S. viewers, it will be a revelation. Based on a novel by Vladislav Vancura, this stirring and poetic depiction of a feud between two rival medieval clans is a fierce, epic, and meticulously designed evocation of the clashes between Christianity and paganism, humankind and nature, love and violence. Vlácil’s approach was to re-create the textures and mentalities of a long-ago way of life, rather than to make a conventional historical drama, and the result is dazzling. With its inventive widescreen cinematography, editing, and sound design, Marketa Lazarová is an experimental action film.
1967 • 159 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • In Czech and German with English subtitles • 2.35:1 aspect ratio
SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
• New high-definition digital film restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
• New interviews with actors Magda Vášáryová, Ivan Palúch, and Vlastimil Harapes and costume designer Theodor Pištek
• New interviews with film historian Peter Hames and journalist and critic Antonín Liehm
• New English subtitle translation
• PLUS: A booklet featuring new essays by film scholar Tom Gunning and author and translator Alex Zucker and a 1969 interview with Vlácil by Liehm
• More!
Over a decade in the making, Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour-plus opus is a monumental investigation of the unthinkable: the murder of more than six million Jews by the Nazis. Using no archival footage, Lanzmann instead focuses on first-person testimonies (of survivors and former Nazis, as well as other witnesses), employing a circular, free-associative method in assembling them. The intellectual yet emotionally overwhelming Shoah is not a film about excavating the past but an intensive portrait of the ways in which the past is always present, and it is inarguably one of the most important cinematic works of all time.
1985 • 550 minutes • Color • Monaural • 1.33:1 aspect ratio
DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
• New high-definition digital film restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
• Three additional films by director Claude Lanzmann: A Visitor from the Living (1999, 68 minutes), Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4 p.m. (2001, 102 minutes), and The Karski Report (2010, 54 minutes)
• New conversation between critic Serge Toubiana and Lanzmann
• Interview with Lanzmann about A Visitor from the Living and Sobibor
• New conversation between associate director of photography Caroline Champetier and filmmaker Arnaud Desplechin
• Trailer
• PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic Kent Jones and writings by Lanzmann
Attention Canada: SHOAH is a US only release. WILD STRAWBERRIES and MARKETA LAZAROVA are available in English-speaking Canada only. THINGS TO COME and SAFETY LAST! are available in all Canada.
I am glad and surprised as well. City Lights is still a must for me but I am very happy with the release of Safety Last
Same here Pat...patience with City Lights...it will come soon enough. I'm always psyched for more silents. I've been enjoying Kino's current Keaton release. Keep 'em coming!
I also considered getting that one too, but decided to wait on it as well. However, every month now I've been anticipating another Fassbinder release and keep getting disappointed . Before that news that they gained all those films, I was planning on collecting all these older DVD releases that keep getting harder to find, which I also put off for the most part
There's a slew of Fassbinders on Hulu right now...including:
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
Beware of a Holy Whor*
Chinese Roulette
Effi Briest
Fear of Fear
Gods of the Plague
Mother Kusters Goes To Heaven
Satan's Brew
The American Soldier
Ali: Fear Eats The Soul
Veronika Voss
The Marriage of Maria Braun
Same here Pat...patience with City Lights...it will come soon enough. I'm always psyched for more silents. I've been enjoying Kino's current Keaton release. Keep 'em coming!
I wonder if the "more" for Marketa Lazarova might suggest another film. He made 3 films around the same time (The Devil's Trap, Marketa Lazarova, Valley of the Bees) that I wouldn't say are a trilogy but deal with the Medieval themes.
Out of those 3, I believe Valley of the Bees was the only one that has had a R1 release (now OOP though). So wonder if The Devil's Trap could be pushed in as an extra?
I'm just putting it out there: Things to Come is no Metropolis.
Floating between 30's socialism and fears of war, there was a big push for HG Wells social-scifi in British films.
(Also because Wells was retiring in the 30's, and able to get the screenplays for this and "The Man Who Could Work Miracles" into production.)
It's DEFINITELY no Metropolis, despite the production design--it's too Menzies-ponderous to put Giorgio Moroder songs to--but at least you get Wells' more refined social preaching right from the source.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Fellini912
I am really glad they pick up a Harold Lloyd title (and the best one at that). My opinion, this movie is equal in greatness as The General and City Lights.
Safety Last, for those who've never seen it outside of the couple seconds in Hugo (or any other silent-film retrospective), is the proverbial Freakin' Hysterical. And that's "hysteria" in both senses of the word.
Audiences were reportedly (if maybe exaggerated) fainting at Lloyd's near-misses in 1923 theaters, and I'll guarantee a few gripped knuckles on your armrest at home.
But Lloyd was more famous for A) playing a more average nerdy character you cringed in embarrassment for--rather than Chaplin's clowning and Keaton's big spectaculars--and B) being ahead of his time in preserving silent films.
I knew Criterion would give Suzanne Lloyd's hold on the estate a better home after that last DVD collection (Lionsgate?), just that I didn't expect it to happen so soon. Criterion?: The Freshman. NOW.
Safety Last, for those who've never seen it outside of the couple seconds in Hugo (or any other silent-film retrospective), is the proverbial Freakin' Hysterical. And that's "hysteria" in both senses of the word.
Audiences were reportedly (if maybe exaggerated) fainting at Lloyd's near-misses in 1923 theaters, and I'll guarantee a few gripped knuckles on your armrest at home.
The characters in Hugo were sure enough freaked out by the scene. It's such effective filmmaking in every sense.
Did you order it from them, or are they just really really that nice?
[Show spoiler]
Yes, like way back in December. However, for some reason it's shipping from BC instead of Ontario for some reason, and thus will probably not arrive on Friday, as expected. At they ship stuff slightly early, or split their shipments at no extra charge so you don't have to wait 3 months because one or two items is a pre-order.
Freaking Chapters isn't shipping an order I made in December until tomorrow, just because one item out of 3 was a preorder. They're also stupid about not refunding gift cards and/or your money until an order ships. I cancelled the 4th item as I ordered the wrong edition of the book, and they're still going to charge me the full amount of my order, and will refund me 8 bucks on my giftcard, and then another 7 bucks to my visa after they ship the order, because according to them once it's in their system, they have to charge it, unlike Amazon, who just deduct the total as soon as you cancel an item. I only ordered from Chapters because I had a free giftcard, otherwise I wouldn't touch them with a ten-foot pole.
I'm finally getting my precious, along with a couple books, and once they issue me my refund, I'll get the correct version of The Once and Future King, that includes The Book of Merlyn:
pretty blown away that Criterion is releasing Shoah on bd.
possibly the most heartbreaking and powerful doc ever imo.
cannot wait to see it in hd.
every single person in this thread owes it to him/herself to watch it at least once.
(makes me curious in there will also be a MoC version in the near future)
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. Before that news that they gained all those films, I was planning on collecting all these older DVD releases that keep getting harder to find, which I also put off for the most part 
And that's "hysteria" in both senses of the word. 
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