DVD Digest for February 24, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 15:00:00 GMT

This week, the midwinter doldrums hit the DVD market, with only a handful of notable DVD and Blu-Ray releases hitting shelves today.

The big news this week is the controversial Blu-Ray release of William Friedkin’s classic police procedural, The French Connection. Much ink has been spilled over William Friedkin’s tinkering with the look of his Oscar-winner for the Blu-Ray release, and while I can’t say for sure (not having bought into the Blu-Ray scene as yet) the images I’ve seen from the new release haven’t been encouraging. With their almost oppressive graininess and a color shift that appears to put the blue in “Blu-Ray”, nothing I’ve seen speaks very well to the suitability of the new technology Friedkin ran on the film when preparing the disc. But then, I’ve always been of the mind that DVD and Blu-Ray was meant to be not only a means of watching a film in the comfort of your living room, but also of film preservation, of keeping a record of the films they contain as close as possible to the way they were originally seen. Anyway, that’s enough of my editorializing. The French Connection is one of three Blu-Ray only releases getting released today by Fox, the other two being John Frankenheimer’s The French Connection II and Richard C. Sarafian’s Vanishing Point, a prime future candidate for a Reviews By Request column.

Another ideal Reviews By Request topic would be Eagle Pennell’s early proto-indie, The Whole Shootin’ Match (Watchmaker Films). Considered by many a keystone of the independent film movement, Pennell’s film went unseen for years before turning up again in theatres last year. Other classics coming to DVD today include Hector Babenco’s Ironweed, starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson, and Dario Argento’s Four Flies on Grey Velvet.

This week’s selection of recent releases coming to DVD is a pretty meager lot, highlighted by a pair of arthouse offerings: the documentary Chris and Don: A Love Story (Zeitgeist), about the author Christopher Isherwood and his decades-long love affair with much-younger artist Don Bachardy, and the Irish marital drama Eden (Ryko Distribution).

Finally, this week’s TV on DVD releases include: Bender and friends in their newest feature-length adventure Futurama: Into the Wild Green Yonder (Fox, also Blu-Ray); Bryan Cranston in Breaking Bad Season 1 (Sony); nineties “Must See TV” staple Just Shoot Me Season 3 (Sony); and family-friendly Indiana Jones-lite adventure in The Librarian: Curse of the Judas Chalice (Sony).

YouTube Film Critics: Spill and the Reel Geezers

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Newspapers have been shedding personnel at an alarming rate in recent months, and those of us who earn our beer money writing about movies are no exception. As the Hollywood Reporter notes in a piece about small independent films being overlooked by major newspapers, “Critics have recently been laid off, bought out of their contracts or left and were not replaced at the Los Angeles Times, the Village Voice, New York Newsday and more than 15 papers around the country.”

This presents a problem for you, the film consumer. Where to go for a diverse array of informed opinion on the motion pictures of the day? Well, once you’ve read all the latest news and reviews at the Screengrab, you might want to click on over to YouTube, where the time-honored Siskel & Ebert format lives on in two very different web series.

Spill.com is the latest permutation of Korey Coleman’s long-running Austin cable access show The Reel Deal. Coleman, his friend Martin Thomas, and a rotating cast of co-hosts conducted a loose, funny and very low budget roundtable discussion of the current cinema for over a decade before relocating to the internet. A cartoonist and filmmaker (his indie film 2 A.M. played SXSW in 2006), Coleman decided to take on a new creative challenge and animate webisodes of The Reel Deal (podcasts of this version of the show can be found here). The show proved so popular, it was bought out by a New York company and reemerged as Spill.com. Aside from Korey, the rest of the Reel Deal crew took on new personas for the revamped version, but the irreverent humor and down-to-earth vibe remain intact, as you can see in this review of The Mist:

At the other end of the spectrum, we have the Reel Geezers. If you ever wanted to recreate the experience of listening to your grandparents bicker about movies, this is the show for you. Lorenzo Semple Jr. (screenwriter of Papillon, The Parallax View and 16 Batman episodes) and Marcia Nasatir (a former agent and producer of The Big Chill and Ironweed) give the octogenarian viewpoint on the latest releases, which is particularly helpful when it comes to a movie like Superbad:

The Screengrab : ironweed

DVD Digest for February 24, 2009

YouTube Film Critics: Spill and the Reel Geezers