With HMV Canada going bankrupt and closing down, a disk addict gets a couple of months of increasingly cheap deals, leading to some great and some not-so-wise purchases.
The disappearance of real-world disk retail
Rough Cut Blog
Classic Howard Hawks on Blu-ray
His Girl Friday (1940) and Only Angels Have Wings (1939), two of Howard Hawks’ most critically acclaimed movies, have received excellent treatment from Criterion on Blu-ray, along with a restored transfer of Lewis Milestone’s pre-code adaptation of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s play The Front Page (1931), the source of Hawks’ cynical 1940 romantic comedy.
Viewing notes, March 2017: Part Two
Another random sample of recent viewing, from Ken Russell’s debut feature French Dressing through Andrew Bujalski’s retro-video experiment Computer Chess to David Mackenzie’s Oscar-nominated Hell or High Water.
CageyFilms Documentaries now on Vimeo
Cagey Films launches two documentaries on Vimeo-on-Demand.
Canoa, A Shameful Memory (1976): Criterion Blu-ray review
Criterion’s release of Felipe Cazals’ Canoa: A Shameful Memory (1976) makes available a key film in Mexican cinema history. A devastating depiction of political violence, the film uses radical techniques to deconstruct a brutal incident which actually occurred in the small town of San Miguel Canoa in 1968.
Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years (2015): Criterion Blu-ray review
Criterion’s new Blu-ray release showcases Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years (2015), a subtle character study with career-best performances from Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay as a married couple whose settled lives are disrupted by an event which predates their relationship.
The Key to Eraserhead?
Jon Fairhurst offers an original approach to film analysis by proposing the possible influence of a classic text on David Lynch’s Eraserhead in the form of a graphic novel, The Key to Eraserhead, released as an ebook on the 40th anniversary of the film’s first public screening at Filmex in Los Angeles on March 19, 1977.
Viewing notes, March 2017: Part One
A round-up of recent Blu-ray viewing, with some classics, an occasional dud, and a few old favourites.
A Poverty Row evening
An evening of pizza and movies plunged me and my friend Steve into the depths of no-budget horror with a double dose of Ed Wood (Bride of the Monster, 1955) and Andy Milligan (The Man With Two Heads, 1972).
Hammer Horror on Blu-ray
Hammer Films are, of course, best known for launching the modern era of horror with their late ’50s colour reworkings of the Universal classics from the ’30s, beginning with Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Dracula (1958). These movies, colourful, somewhat perverse for the time, and more graphic than earlier films in the genre, inspired Roger […] Read More
