Criterion resurrects an important American independent film with a stunning Blu-ray of Jack Garfein’s Something Wild (1961), a showcase for members of the Actors Studio and the Method.
Criterion Blu-ray review: Jack Garfein’s Something Wild (1961)
Author: Kenneth George Godwin
Tripping, shopping and the airborne multiplex
A recent trip to England produced stacks of new disks, some interesting books, and several in-flight movies.
Year-end ruminations: 2016
2016 was an impressive year for movies on disk, with a wide variety of new and classic releases, prestige productions and exploitation, and some interesting rediscoveries … too many to pick just a handful of “bests”.
A 3D New Year
At my annual New Year’s ritual of dinner and movies at my friend Steve’s, I finally got to sample the home 3D viewing experience; we sampled a number of movies, old and new, cheap and expensive, but while the experience had some interesting aspects, I can’t imagine wanting to watch in 3D too often.
Criterion Blu-ray review: Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog (2015)
Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog (2015) is a charming, discursive, ultimately deeply moving exploration of death, loss, grief and life. Criterion’s Blu-ray edition provides an illuminating conversation with the filmmaker about her art, her career, and her experience of life.
Marlon Brando’s One-Eyed Jacks (1961)
Criterion’s Blu-ray release of One-Eyed Jacks is one of the disk highlights of the year, its restored image and sound confirming this great western’s stature. Marlon Brando’s sole directing effort is a key transitional moment between the traditional western and the national myth it represented and the modern deconstruction of that myth by filmmakers like Sam Peckinpah and Arthur Penn.
Time, paradox and loss
Artsploitation Films has released George Moises’s Counter Clockwise (2016), a new low-budget addition to the time travel paradox sub-genre; and several notable cinema personalities have recently departed.
Arrow’s American Horror Project, vol 1
With a three disk first volume, Arrow Video embark on an ambitious undertaking with the American Horror Project, which intends to gather together independent, fringe features from the ’70s and ’80s, surrounded by supplementary features which provide context and possibly a cumulative history of this genre niche. Set one gathers three movies of varying quality.
Old horrors, newly packaged
Shout! Factory releases new Blu-ray editions of John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) and William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist III (1990), each disk sporting a new 2K transfer and a wealth of supplementary materials.
The subjectivity of watching: Bertrand Tavernier’s Death Watch (1980)
Sometimes sharing a favourite movie doesn’t produce the reaction we expect; it can be puzzling, even a little painful to discover that a friend doesn’t always like the same things we do.
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