My genre viewing on disk over the past couple of months ranges from classics to crap, and I have to admit that I’ve enjoyed it all. The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) From England, I’ve obtained impressive Blu-rays of three key movies from the period when “modern” horror was born: Hammer’s first two colour Gothic features, […]
I’ve mentioned the boutique label Twilight Time before; they continue to release an interestingly eclectic series of limited edition Blu-rays (3000 copies of each title), with their specialty being a focus on the films’ soundtracks (each title includes a separate music track), not so surprising since they’re available exclusively from Screen Archives Entertainment, a site […]
Falling behind again! Things have been hectic lately – working on a documentary which has turned out to be bigger than expected and is now way overdue, plus starting a new project with a tight deadline, I haven’t had a lot of time to write down notes on what I’ve been watching the past couple […]
Japan’s legendary Studio Ghibli is, of course, best known for the epic animated fantasies of Hayao Miyazaki. Although most of these films focus on young characters with appeal to children, the films themselves are complex and deal with serious, mature themes. Less prominent are a handful of films which have no fantasy elements – in […]
For several years now, there have been dire predictions of the inevitable demise of movies on disk. In a world rapidly assigning more reality to the digital “cloud” than to actual physical objects, disks are supposedly quaintly old-fashioned. People, we are told, want instant access to everything on whatever device they happen to have closest […]
I’ve been a fan of Shintaro Katsu’s series of films about Zatoichi, the blind swordsman, since I came across Home Vision Entertainment’s DVD editions of the first two, The Tale of Zatoichi and The Tale of Zatoichi Continues (both 1962) many years ago in the video department of Winnipeg’s long-gone A&B Sound. I was grabbed […]
Horror has been a staple of movie-making almost since the medium was invented – Georges Melies made Le Manoir du Diable in 1896 – and the genre has at times been suspended between art and exploitation, though perhaps more often slipping to the latter end of that spectrum. In the silent period, horror was dominated […]
I was a fan of Edgar G. Ulmer before I had any idea who he was. Sometime back in the ’70s, I saw The Black Cat (1934) on television and it became, and remained, my favourite classic Universal horror film. As much as I like the others (particularly the witty work of James Whale), the […]
Considering the amount of effort and energy required to make a movie, it’s not surprising that a filmmaker can become obsessed with a project. Major directors sometimes get lost trying to complete a movie – think Werner Herzog determined to drag a full-sized steamship over a mountain in Fitzcarraldo, or Francis Ford Coppola growing mad […]
While it’s quite common to like a movie despite its flaws, it’s also possible to appreciate a film in spite of its content. Griffith’s technical achievement can be admired even as we are appalled by the racist politics of Birth of a Nation; we can recognize the visual beauty of Riefenstahl’s use of camera and […]