Personal landmark: my 1000th post

Ugolin (Rellys)'s guilt turns into romantic obsession in Marcel Pagnol's Manon des Sources (1952)

It’s hard to believe, but this is my 1000th post since I started writing this blog back in October 2010. Not having missed a single week since that first post – and often posting more than once a week – my writing here has been the most sustained activity I’ve ever undertaken. While there’s no doubt an element of ego involved in putting this much personal opinion out into the world, the blog has served something of a self-therapeutic purpose, providing focus and a personal challenge to off-set the tedium of the federal government clerical job I landed after my editing career dried up. Having retired six months ago, I’m finding myself wondering whether the blog has served its purpose and the time has come to look for other creative pursuits.

Claude Berri’s Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources (1986): Criterion Blu-ray review

Manon (Emmanuelle Béart) watches over those who ruined her family in Claude Berri's Manon des Sources (1986)

Criterion have released an excellent two-disk edition of Claude Berri’s adaptation of Marcel Pagnol’s epic tragedy of idealism brought down by greed and petty rivalries in early 20th Century rural Provence. New 4K restorations of Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources (both 1986) are visually ravishing, while the drama is embodied in superb performances from Gérard Depardieu, Yves Montand, Daniel Auteuil, Emmanuelle Béart and an excellent supporting cast.

Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore (1973): Criterion Blu-ray review

Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud) sees yet another woman to pursue in Jean Eustache's The Mother and the Whore (1973)

Criterion’s new release presents a stunning restoration of Jean Eustache’s intimate epic The Mother and the Whore (1973), a bleak epitaph for the failed promise of social change which climaxed and crashed with the May 1968 uprising in Paris: a few years later, the film’s characters are adrift and trying to rebuild a sense of themselves in a society which has rejected them and their dreams.

Claude Chabrol’s La cérémonie (1995): Criterion Blu-ray review

Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire) and Jeanne (Isabelle Huppert) become allies against the bourgeois Lalievres family in Claude Chabrol’s La cérémonie (1995)

Four decades into a career which began with the New Wave, Claude Chabrol delivered a masterpiece with La cérémonie (1995), a psychological mystery adapted from a Ruth Rendell novel. Sandrine Bonnaire and Isabelle Huppert play a pair of working class women whose bitterness and resentment drive them on a collision course with the bourgeois Lelievre family. Criterion’s new Blu-ray edition provides some illuminating supplements on the director and his two stars.

Serendipity at the mall: disk discoveries from England and Australia

Compromised effects undermine producer George Pal's attempt to depict space travel in Byron Haskin's Conquest of Space (1955)

A recent trip to one of the last places in Winnipeg where you can actually buy movies on disk, armed with a bag full of DVDs and Blu-rays to trade, netted an interesting assortment of items, new and used, including some from the UK and Australia; it brought back the pleasures of in-store shopping and immediately being able to go home and watch what I’d just bought.

Murder, robbery and paranormal activity: three new releases

Bank robber Milan (Johnny Hallyday) seems weary of his life choices in Patrice Leconte's Man on the Train (2002)

Three recent releases spanning nine decades offer radically different viewing experiences, from James Whale’s pre-Code courtroom drama The Kiss Before the Mirror (1933), rife with bourgeois misogyny, to Patrice Leconte’s Man on the Train (2002), steeped in existential weariness, to Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s Something in the Dirt (2022), in which the residents of a nondescript Los Angeles apartment discover a portal to cosmic horror.

Blasts from the past

Year End 2018

Abbas Kiarostami’s The Koker Trilogy (1987-94):
Criterion Blu-ray review

Lost Soul: Richard Stanley vs Hollywood commerce

Asia extreme

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