Chimes at Midnight The Immortal Story (which I'm ashamed to admit will be a blind buy) Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words (this looks absolutely loaded, and I've always loved her)
Possible:
Woman in the Dunes A Taste of Honey
It's definitely a strong month. Better start saving money.
Great month (for me). In for McCabe, Taste and Chimes. The latter two will have to wait for a sale, but McCabe has been on my 10 most wanted list for years. Day one!
I'm very curious what the restoration of McCabe will look like. I always remember it being incredibly soft and I've read rumors that much of it was shot through a filter (I've also read where it wasn't). I can't wait until August.
The Immortal Story is on Hulu for anyone that wants to check it out. Don't think it's via Criterion at the moment, and the transfer they have looks rather poor. It's only an hour long though. I'll probably watch it tonight.
Fun observation: Chimes at Midnight's spine is 830, and it happens to be coming out on..8/30! I think that's the first time a spine has matched its release date.
The Immortal Story is on Hulu for anyone that wants to check it out. Don't think it's via Criterion at the moment, and the transfer they have looks rather poor. It's only an hour long though. I'll probably watch it tonight.
I started to watch it on Hulu when I had the free trial, but it didn't have subtitles. The film itself was interesting, but I was just losing chunks of dialogue, so I turned it off.
The Teshigahara release is interesting. It seems to have almost all of the supplements from the box set. Not sure what that says about the fate of the other 2 films...
This unorthodox dream western by Robert Altman may be the most radically beautiful film to come out of the New American Cinema that transformed Hollywood in the early 1970s. It stars Warren Beatty and Julie Christie as an enterprising gambler and a bordello madam, both newcomers to the raw Pacific Northwest mining town of Presbyterian Church, who join forces to provide the miners with a superior kind of *****house experience. The appearance of representatives of a powerful mining company with interests of its own, however, threatens to be the undoing of their plans. With its fascinating flawed characters, evocative cinematography by the great Vilmos Zsigmond, and soundtrack that innovatively interweaves overlapping dialogue and haunting Leonard Cohen songs, McCabe & Mrs. Miller brilliantly deglamorized and revitalized the most American of genres.
Special Features:
New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
Audio commentary from 2002 featuring director Robert Altman and producer David Foster
New documentary on the making of the film, featuring actors René Auberjonois, Keith Carradine, and Michael Murphy; casting director Graeme Clifford; and script supervisor Joan Tewkesbury
New conversation about the film and Altman's career between film historians Cari Beauchamp and Rick Jewell
Featurette from the film's production, shot on location in 1970
Q&A from 1999 with production designer Leon Ericksen, hosted by the Art Directors Guild Film Society
Archival footage from interviews with cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, in which he discusses his work on the film
Gallery of stills from the set by photographer Steve Schapiro
Excerpts from two 1971 episodes of The Dick Cavett Show featuring Altman and film critic Pauline Kael
Trailer
PLUS: An essay by film critic Nathaniel Rich
STREET DATE: AUGUST 9.
Ingrid Bergman in Her Own Words
Whether headlining films in Sweden, Italy, or Hollywood, Ingrid Bergman always pierced the screen with a singular soulfulness. With this new documentary, made on the occasion of the one hundredth anniversary of Bergman's birth, director Stig Björkman allows us unprecedented access to her world, culling from the most personal of archival materials—letters, diary entries, photographs, and Super 8 and 16 mm footage Bergman herself shot—and following her from youth to tumultuous married life and motherhood. Intimate and artful, this lovingly assembled portrait, narrated by actor Alicia Vikander, provides luminous insight into the life and career of an undiminished legend.
Special Features:
High-definition digital transfer, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
New interview with director Stig Björkman
Super 8 home movies shot by Bergman in the 1930s
Two deleted scenes, showing Bergman's daughters reading an essay she wrote at age seventeen and an interview with film historian and Bergman scholar Rosario Tronnolone
Extended versions of scenes featuring interviews with actors Sigourney Weaver and Liv Ullmann and Bergman's daughter Isabella Rossellini and with the three Rossellini siblings
Clip from the 1932 film Landskamp, featuring Bergman in her first screen role
Outtakes from Bergman's 1936 film On the Sunny Side
Music video for Eva Dahlgren's song "The Movie About Us," which is included on the film's soundtrack
Trailer
New English subtitle translation
PLUS: An essay by film scholar Jeanine Basinger
STREET DATE: AUGUST 16.
A Taste of Honey
The revolutionary British New Wave films of the early 1960s were celebrated for their uncompromising depictions of working-class lives and relations between the sexes. Directed by Tony Richardson, a leading light of that movement, and based on one of the most controversial plays of its time, A Taste of Honey stars Rita Tushingham, in a star-making debut role, as a disaffected teenager finding her way amid the economic desperation of industrial Manchester, and despite an absent, self-absorbed mother. With its unapologetic identification with social outcasts and its sensitive, modern approach to matters of sexuality and race, Richardson's classic is a still startling benchmark work of realism.
Special Features:
New, restored 4K digital transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
New interviews with actors Rita Tushingham and Murray Melvin
Audio interview with director and coscreenwriter Tony Richardson, conducted by film critic Gideon Bachmann at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival
New interview with Kate Dorney, curator of modern and contemporary theater at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, about A Taste of Honey's onstage origins
Excerpt from a 1960 television interview with A Taste of Honey playwright Shelagh Delaney Momma Don't Allow (1956), Richardson's first theatrical film
PLUS: An essay by film scholar Colin MacCabe
STREET DATE: AUGUST 23.
Woman in the Dunes
One of the 1960s' great international art-house sensations, Woman in the Dunes was for many the grand unveiling of the surreal, idiosyncratic world of Hiroshi Teshigahara. Eiji Okada plays an amateur entomologist who has left Tokyo to study an unclassified species of beetle found in a vast desert. When he misses his bus back to civilization, he is persuaded to spend the night with a young widow (Kyoko Kishida) in her hut at the bottom of a sand dune. What results is one of cinema's most unnerving and palpably erotic battles of the sexes, as well as a nightmarish depiction of the Sisyphean struggle of everyday life—an achievement that garnered Teshigahara an Academy Award nomination for best director.
Special Features:
New high-definition digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
Video essay on the film from 2007 by film scholar James Quandt
Four short films from director Hiroshi Teshigahara's early career:
Hokusai (1953)
Ikebana (1956)
Tokyo 1958 (1958)
Ako (1965)
Teshigahara and Abe, a 2007 documentary examining the collaboration between Teshigahara and novelist Kobo Abe, featuring interviews with film scholars Donald Richie and Tadao Sato, film programmer Richard Peña, set designer Arata Isozaki, producer Noriko Nomura, and screenwriter John Nathan
Trailer
PLUS: An essay by film scholar Audie Bock and a 1980 interview with Teshigahara
STREET DATE: AUGUST 23.
Chimes at Midnight
The crowning achievement of Orson Welles's extraordinary film career, Chimes at Midnight was the culmination of the filmmaker's lifelong obsession with Shakespeare's ultimate rapscallion, Sir John Falstaff. Usually a comic supporting figure, Falstaff—the loyal, often soused friend of King Henry IV's wayward son Prince Hal—here becomes the focus: a robustly funny and ultimately tragic screen antihero played by Welles with looming, lumbering grace. Integrating elements from both Henry IV plays as well as Richard II, Henry V, and The Merry Wives of Windsor, Welles created a gritty and unorthodox Shakespeare film, one that he intended, he said, as "a lament . . . for the death of Merrie England." Poetic, philosophical, and visceral—with a kinetic centerpiece battle sequence that rivals anything else in the director's body of work—Chimes at Midnight is as monumental as the figure at its heart.
Special Features:
New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
Audio commentary featuring film scholar James Naremore, author of The Magic World of Orson Welles
New interview with actor Keith Baxter
New interview with director Orson Welles's daughter Beatrice Welles, who appeared in the film at age seven
New interview with actor and Welles biographer Simon Callow
New interview with film historian Joseph McBride, author of What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?
Interview with Welles while at work editing the film, from a 1965 episode of The Merv Griffin Show
Trailer
STREET DATE: AUGUST 30.
The Immortal Story
Orson Welles's first color film and final completed fictional feature, The Immortal Story is a moving and wistful adaptation of a tale by Isak Dinesen. Welles stars as a wealthy merchant in nineteenth-century Macao, who becomes obsessed with bringing to life an oft-related anecdote about a rich man who gives a poor sailor a small sum of money to impregnate his wife. Also starring an ethereal Jeanne Moreau, this jewel-like film, dreamily shot by Willy Kurant and suffused with the music of Erik Satie, is a brooding, evocative distillation of Welles's artistic interests—a story about the nature of storytelling and the fine line between illusion and reality.
Special Features:
New, restored 4K digital transfer of the English-language version of the film, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
Alternate French-language version of the film
Audio commentary from 2005 featuring film scholar Adrian Martin
Portrait: Orson Welles, a 1968 documentary directed by François Reichenbach and Frédéric Rossif
New interview with actor Norman Eshley
Interview from 2004 with cinematographer Willy Kurant
New interview with Welles scholar François Thomas>
PLUS: An essay by film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum
Looks like the supplements from the Teshigahara set will remain for the blu reissue of Woman in the Dunes. For the OOP price I paid on eBay, not sure I'll upgrade this one to BD. I started the film not long ago, but it started showing a lot of skin and I had to turn it off around the kids.
Similar to the David Lean and BBS Story sets seems like Criterion is taking the popular titles and breaking them out. Profit scheme.
What a great month. Especially pleased to see the Welles titles, and more kitchen-sink drama from my home country. Interested to see if McCabe & Mrs. Miller is as good a film as has been made out here and elsewhere (a definite blind buy), and the Bergman doc sounds like an ideal candidate for a future B&N sale.
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