Hey everyone I have a question. I just finished watching two Abbas Kiarostami films, Certified Copy & Close-Up. Certified copy was good, though I could not stand Binoche's neurotic character (her acting was magnificent I just don't do well with neurotic women lol). But Close-up I just found to be nothing special, maybe I am missing something but to me it was a film about a man who clearly is not all there. He seemed like a pathological liar who was completely self-motivated. And as far as the film went, it felt very empty, just viewing the process of those days events and nothing more. I really do not understand how this movie receives such praise, what am I missing because to me that movie was completely empty.
Didn't you find the layering of realities pretty interesting? This is not really considered a documentary, yet it is very much a re-enactment for most of the film which calls into question what constitutes a documentary, especially when so many documentaries are just found footage or images supported by people essentially re-enacting what they did or saw. That's something to ponder.
Sabzian actually portrays himself (as well as portrays himself portraying Makhmalbaf) recreating his deceit of posing as Makhmalbaf in real life. Then at the end, Makhmalbaf picks him up from the trial re-enactment, bringing the whole thing weirdly full circle. It's a really compelling investigation of the nature of documentary and the nature of pretending to be a character in my opinion. Sabzian's motivations seem kind of crazy, but are his aspirations any weirder than a random reality show contestant? He's a nobody that wanted to be somebody, and the nature of the power of celebrity helped to make his deceit totally blow up and become something too large for him to control.
I also think the fact that everyone agreed to re-enact this thing is just crazy.
Check out the special features if you're really interested in better understanding it - that's why they put them there.
All of that said, my favorite scene apart from the ending is the extended shot of the can rolling down the deserted street. I don't know why, but I love that.
I only referred to Disney as I'm sure a few had a lot of work done to them to clean edges and make colours solid but they ended up looking pretty poor and nasty looking.
I hope they keep the grittiness - I just don't know what to expect from a Bluray that is a cartoon a I only own blurays that are real life, except Fantastic Mr Fox.
I guess with cartoon animations it doesn't need to look crystal clear or perfect, especially the film subject matter, its needs the grit and dirt :P
Not seen Watershed Down in YEARS though, I mean 10+ years haha, so looking forward to seeing with the supplements . Would have be nice if it came with the novel - but I know many would complain about the size....
I think one of the most amazing restorations I've ever seen was done by Warner Brothers on the 1966 animated TV special Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas. On the left is a frame from the original DVD and on the right is a frame I captured from the remastered Blu-ray edition. Over the years I had forgotten how beautiful the colors were when I first saw this on TV as a child ... pretty amazing difference, don't you think? Personally, I like my grinches to be green rather than brown!
An exciting month! Watership Down feels like an awfully important release for Criterion. If it sells really well...
Seriously, though, I don't think they've shied away from animation due to sales. Fantastic Planet would probably match or outsell Watership Down. Same for Akira. I think rights are the issue.
I think one of the most amazing restorations I've ever seen was done by Warner Brothers on the 1966 animated TV special Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas. On the left is a frame from the original DVD and on the right is a frame I captured from the remastered Blu-ray edition. Over the years I had forgotten how beautiful the colors were when I first saw this on TV as a child ... pretty amazing difference, don't you think? Personally, I like my grinches to be green rather than brown!
MOC's Fantastic Planet Blu-ray wasn't nearly as revelatory as this (I don't think the source needed as much work), but I was struck by how much more vibrant and colorful it looked compared to the DVD transfer. So like any other film, animation can really benefit from restoration and high definition.
Could anyone describe Satyricon? Would you reccomend it?
Let's see ... how can I best say this? Oh, okay, I've got it:
A few years ago, the Museum of Modern Art in Fort Worth, Texas, had a Fellini retrospective featuring gorgeous, restored prints of his key directorial achievements, including Fellini Satyricon. I attended the entire series, and I can honestly tell you that I Vitelloni, La Strada, The Nights of Cabiria, La Dolce Vita, 8-1/2, Juliet of the Spirits, and Amarcord are all cinematic masterpieces. That said, even the greatest directors occasionally make visually beautiful films that are nonetheless pretentious, boring, and overlong. Know what I'm sayin'?
I can't believe it took Criterion 15 years to release an animated film. (They only seem to have discovered Westerns relatively recently too.) I haven't seen Watership Down since I was a kid (and I loved the book as a youngster), so I may have to give the DVD a rental first. I've already got the BFI Autumn BD and the Criterion DVD, so no need for an upgrade there. Don't Look Now is a much-welcomed release (I am actually going to just throw away my SC BD, I only kept it for the extras), Satryicon should look spectacular with the new restoration, and I'm excited to see the outtakes from Une partie de campagne, as the BFI disc was bare-bones, save a Kemp commentary. I'll have to research the Godard one. A very good month!
You should actually keep the SC release of Don't Look Now for the exclusive special features, like the terrific commentary.
Seriously, though, I don't think they've shied away from animation due to sales. Fantastic Planet would probably match or outsell Watership Down. Same for Akira. I think rights are the issue.
La Planet Savauge (Fantastic Planet) deserves a wider release on Blu-Ray then just Europe. The soundtrack itself is amazing, hypnotic. A shame if it's down to rights since it would be a perfect Criterion release.
After a decade in the wilds of avant-garde and early video experimentation, Jean-Luc Godard (Breathless) returned to commercial cinema with this work of social commentary, star-driven and narrative while remaining defiantly intellectual and visually cutting-edge. Every Man for Himself, featuring a script by Jean-Claude Carrière (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie) and Anne-Marie Miéville (Ici et ailleurs), looks at the sexual and professional lives of three people—a television producer (Van Gogh’s Jacques Dutronc), his ex-girlfriend (The Return of Martin Guerre’s Nathalie Baye), and a prostitute (White Material’s Isabelle Huppert)—to create a meditative story about work, relationships, and the notion of freedom. Made twenty years into his career, the film was, according to Godard, a second debut.
1980 • 88 minutes • Color • Monaural • In French with English subtitles • 1.66:1 aspect ratio
SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
• New high-definition digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• Le scénario (1979), a short video created by director Jean-Luc Godard to secure financing for Every Man for Himself
• New video essay by critic Colin MacCabe
• New interviews with actor Isabelle Huppert and producer Marin Karmitz
• Archival interviews with actor Nathalie Baye, cinema*tographers Renato Berta and William Lubtchansky, and composer Gabriel Yared
• Two back-to-back 1980 appearances by Godard on The Dick Cavett Show
• Godard 1980, a short film by Jon Jost, Donald Ranvaud, and Peter Wollen, featuring Godard
• Trailer
• PLUS: An essay by critic Amy Taubin
TITLE: EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF (BLU-RAY EDITION)
CAT. NO: CC2439BD
UPC: 7-15515-13631-0
ISBN: 978-1-60465-947-4
SRP: $39.95
STREET: 2/3/15
A DAY IN THE COUNTRY - Blu-ray
This bittersweet work from Jean Renoir (The Rules of the Game), based on a story by Guy de Maupassant, is a tenderly comic idyll about a city family’s picnic in the French countryside and the romancing of the mother and grown daughter by two local men. Conceived as part of a larger project that was never completed, shot in 1936, and released ten years later, the warmly humanist vignette A Day in the Country ranks among Renoir’s most lyrical films, with a love for nature imbuing its every beautiful frame.
1936 • 40 minutes • Black & White • Monaural • In French with English subtitles • 1.33:1 aspect ratio
SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
• New 2K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• Introduction by director Jean Renoir from 1962
• New interview with Renoir scholar Christopher Faulkner about the film’s production
• New video essay by Faulkner on Renoir’s methods
• Un tournage à la campagne, an 89-minute 1994 compilation of outtakes from the film
• Interview with producer Pierre Braunberger from 1979
• Screen tests
• New English subtitle translation
• PLUS: An essay by film scholar Gilberto Perez
TITLE: A DAY IN THE COUNTRY (BLU-RAY EDITION)
CAT. NO: CC2445BD
UPC: 7-15515-13691-4
ISBN: 978-1-60465-953-5
SRP: $39.95
STREET: 2/10/15
DON’T LOOK NOW - Blu-ray
Donald Sutherland (Klute) and Julie Christie (Darling) mesmerize as a married couple on an extended trip to Venice following a family tragedy. While in that elegantly decaying city, they have a series of inexplicable, terrifying, and increasingly dangerous experiences. A masterpiece from Nicolas Roeg (Walkabout), Don’t Look Now, adapted from a story by Daphne du Maurier (Rebecca), is a brilliantly disturbing tale of the supernatural, as renowned for its innovative editing and haunting cinematography as its explicit eroticism and unforgettable denouement, one of the great endings in horror history.
1973 • 110 minutes • Color • Monaural • 1.85:1 aspect ratio
DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
• New 4K digital restoration, approved by director Nicolas Roeg, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• New conversation between the film’s editor, Graeme Clifford, and film writer Bobbie O’Steen
• “Don’t Look Now,” Looking Back, a short 2002 documentary featuring Roeg, Clifford, and cinematographer Anthony Richmond
• Death in Venice, a 2006 interview with composer Pino Donaggio
• Something Interesting, a new documentary on the writing and making of the film, featuring interviews with Richmond, actors Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland, and coscreenwriter Allan Scott
• Nicolas Roeg: The Enigma of Film, a new documentary on Roeg’s style, featuring interviews with filmmakers Danny Boyle and Steven Soderbergh
• Q&A with Roeg at London’s Ciné Lumière from 2003
• Trailer
• PLUS: An essay by film critic David Thompson
The final film from Yasujiro Ozu (Tokyo Story) was also his last masterpiece, a gently heartbreaking story about a man’s dignifed resignation to life’s shifting currents and society’s modernization. Though widower Shuhei (frequent Ozu leading man Chishu Ryu) has been living comfortably for years with his grown daughter, a series of events leads him to accept and encourage her marriage and departure from their home. As elegantly composed and achingly tender as any of the Japanese master’s films, An Autumn Afternoon is one of cinema’s fondest farewells.
1962 • 113 minutes • Color • Monaural • In Japanese with English subtitles • 1.33:1 aspect ratio
BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
• New, 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
• Audio commentary featuring film scholar David Bordwell, author of Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema
• Excerpts from Yasujiro Ozu and “The Taste of Sake,” a 1978 French television program, featuring critics Michel Ciment and Georges Perec, that looks back on Ozu’s career
• Trailer
• New English subtitle translation
• PLUS: Essays by critic Geoff Andrew and scholar Donald Richie
Federico Fellini’s career achieved new levels of eccentricity and brilliance with this remarkable, controversial, extremely loose adaptation of Petronius’s classical Roman satire, written during the reign of Nero. An episodic barrage of sexual licentiousness, godless violence, and eye-catching grotesquerie, Fellini Satyricon follows the exploits of two pansexual young men—the handsome scholar Encolpius and his vulgar, insatiably lusty friend Ascyltus—as they move through a landscape of free-form pagan excess. Creating apparent chaos with exquisite control, Fellini constructs a weird old world that feels like science fiction.
1969 • 129 minutes • Color • Monaural • In Italian with English subtitles • 2.35:1 aspect ratio
SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
• New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• Audio commentary featuring an adaptation of Eileen Lanouette Hughes’s memoir On the Set of “Fellini Satyricon”: A Behind-the-Scenes Diary
• Ciao, Federico!, Gideon Bachmann’s hour-long documentary shot on the set of Fellini Satyricon
• Archival interviews with director Federico Fellini
• New interview with cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno
• New documentary about Fellini’s adaptation of Petronius’s work, featuring interviews with classicists Luca Canali, a consultant on the film, and Joanna Paul
• New interview with photographer Mary Ellen Mark about her experiences on the set and her iconic photographs of Fellini and his film
• Felliniana, a presentation of Fellini Satyricon ephemera from the collection of Don Young
• Trailer
• New English subtitle translation
• PLUS: An essay by film critic Michael Wood
With this passion project, screenwriter-producer-director Martin Rosen brilliantly achieved what was thought difficult, if not impossible: a faithful big-screen adaptation of Richard Adams’s classic British dystopian novel about a community of rabbits seeking safety and happiness after their warren comes under terrible threat. With its naturalistic hand-drawn animation, dreamily expressionistic touches, gorgeously bucolic background design, and elegant voice work from such superb English actors as John Hurt (The Elephant Man), Ralph Richardson (The Fallen Idol), Richard Briers (Much Ado About Nothing), and Denholm Elliott (Raiders of the Lost Ark), Watership Down is an emotionally arresting, dark-toned allegory about freedom amid political turmoil.
1978 • 92 minutes • Color • Stereo • 1.85:1 aspect ratio
SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
• New high-definition digital restoration, with uncompressed stereo soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• New interview with director Martin Rosen
• New appreciation of the film by director Guillermo del Toro
• Picture-in-picture storyboard for the entire film (Blu-ray); four film-to-storyboard scene comparisons (DVD)
• Defining a Style, a 2008 featurette about the film’s aesthetic
• Trailer
• PLUS: An essay by comic book writer Gerard Jones
Attention Canada: EVERYMAN FOR HIMSELF, A DAY IN THE COUNTRY and AN AUTUMN AFTERNOON are available in English-Speaking Canada only. DON’T LOOK NOW, FELLINI SATYRICON and WATERSHIP DOWN are available in all Canada.
You are obsessed with obsession and often the obsessed; employing techniques that constantly challenge the way films are crafted; with protagonists that are find themselves imploding within the very worlds they helped create.
[Show spoiler]Didn't you find the layering of realities pretty interesting? This is not really considered a documentary, yet it is very much a re-enactment for most of the film which calls into question what constitutes a documentary, especially when so many documentaries are just found footage or images supported by people essentially re-enacting what they did or saw. That's something to ponder.
Sabzian actually portrays himself (as well as portrays himself portraying Makhmalbaf) recreating his deceit of posing as Makhmalbaf in real life. Then at the end, Makhmalbaf picks him up from the trial re-enactment, bringing the whole thing weirdly full circle. It's a really compelling investigation of the nature of documentary and the nature of pretending to be a character in my opinion. Sabzian's motivations seem kind of crazy, but are his aspirations any weirder than a random reality show contestant? He's a nobody that wanted to be somebody, and the nature of the power of celebrity helped to make his deceit totally blow up and become something too large for him to control.
I also think the fact that everyone agreed to re-enact this thing is just crazy.
Check out the special features if you're really interested in better understanding it - that's why they put them there.
All of that said, my favorite scene apart from the ending is the extended shot of the can rolling down the deserted street. I don't know why, but I love that.
I guess I see that but based on all the praise I was expecting something else, it really did not seem noteworthy to me. I thought the ending with the real Makhmalbaf picking him up was cool but certainly did not make up for the rest of the film. In addition, I would agree with you that the aerosol can rolling down the hill was definitely my favorite part. I also think it is amazing that he was able to get the real people to play themselves, but unfortunately none of this makes up for the fact that it was a lackluster film. Thanks for the reply
I wonder if killing off Rosie Perez as soon as possible was the secret.
With a consistent subject matter that focuses on humanity in conflict, the master-disciple relationship, the power of nature, and the journey and perspectives of the hero, your methods include a myriad of powerful alternate editing techniques, encompassing the sounds of nature and the ironic use of music.
I rewatched Koyaanisqatsi tonight for the first time since seeing it in a film class a year or so ago. All I can say is that it is a perfect example of why I love film in any capacity. There is only so much you can do with a book or with a painting, but the boundaries of film appear to be limitless.
That Ron Fricke sure knows how to capture his surroundings, jeez. I wonder how much different Powaqqatsi and Naqoyqatsi would be with him involved.
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. Would have be nice if it came with the novel - but I know many would complain about the size....
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