Obscure Cinema

Clash of the tits

Source: Dread Central

Dr. Uwe Boll is at it again! Not content with making some of the worst movies known to humankind, the man behind House of the Dead and Alone in the Dark has issued a personal challenge to Michael Bay, calling on him to meet him in the ring to battle it out, mano a mano, and determine once and for all who is the better director.

You may remember a previous escapade involving Uwe Boll and a boxing ring. Two years ago, he famously challenged his harshest critics to a punch-up in the ring. In something of a perverse twist of fate, Boll resoundingly thrashed all five opponents, proving that it doesn't matter how bad a filmmaker you are, provided you can pack a mean punch. Frankly, I don't fancy Bay's chances if he chooses to accept the challenge.

You can view the Herr Doktor's video message to Bay at MovieSet.

DVD review: Mother of Tears

All things considered, Mother of Tears could so easily have been a much worse film than it is. As a conclusion to the Three Mothers trilogy, it's not even remotely satisfying, paying lip service to various plot elements from the previous entries but failing to continue their thematic concerns in anything but the most superficial manner. Taken on its own terms, however, you have a pacey and at times very entertaining romp through various pieces of 70s and 80s horror iconography, bolstered by some stand-out set-pieces and gung-ho violence. It's something of a reflection of how much times have changed that I can honestly say I enjoyed a Dario Argento film more as a fast, silly rollercoaster ride than as a work of art, but I prefer to look upon this as a "glass half full" endeavour. No, it's not Suspiria or Inferno, but nor is it the disaster it could have been.

Three decades after starting his Three Mothers trilogy, Dario Argento comes full circle with Mother of Tears. I review Optimum's R2 UK release.

So many discs, so little time

The last few days have heralded a shed-load of DVD and Blu-ray releases pouring through my letterbox, most of which I've scarcely had time to give more than a cursory glance. Most of them were free review copies, and a good thing too as I recently had to pay off my Graduate Endowment, so my coffers are looking a little empty at the moment.

First up, and one that I did pay for, was Sony Pictures' UK Blu-ray release of Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. It looks to feature a decent transfer for a catalogue title: detail is, on the whole, very good, but the tell-tale signs of grain reduction are consistently evident. At the moment, I'd peg it as being slightly better than the re-release of The Fifth Element, also from Sony, but more investigation will be needed.

Next up, on Saturday, Shameless Screen Entertainment's UK DVD release of Piero Schivazappa's trippy 60s shocker The Frightened Woman (a.k.a. Femina Ridens). As a nice surprise, they sent me a fully boxed copy rather than the "DVD in a paper wallet" affair that most of the UK studios favour, so I can savour the tacky artwork in all its, erm, glory.

Unfortunately, I can't say anything particularly positive about the transfer. Yes, it looks considerably better than my old VHS dupe, but that's not a fair or particularly realistic comparison. A more valid counterpoint would be Severin Films' release of The Psychic, which had similarly poor image quality, with a lack of detail and what looked like a dodgy scaling job, manifesting itself in the form of jagged diagonal lines. I wonder what caused this. Perhaps both films were acquired from the same licensor, or perhaps both companies used the same (incorrectly set up) encoder? Either way, if I'd paid for a company to encode my film and it came back looking like this, I would have rejected it outright. In case anyone gets the wrong idea, this is nothing to do with the quality of the source materials, which, barring some tape-based inserts for scenes which wouldn't be sourced from a print, appears to be in great shape. This issue here has nothing to do with that and everything to do with the way it has been treated at the authoring stage. Not impressed.

Also in the package was the 2-disc release of the first series of Holby Blue, from 2 Entertain (the BBC's front for commercial exploitation via optical disc). This is interesting, because I recorded the entire series directly to my computer via my USB TV stick back when it first aired, so I had a point of comparison to refer to when examining the image quality. The results, which you can see by clicking the smaller images below, are quite surprising:

Example 1
(Left: Commercial DVD; Right: My recording from DTV)

Example 2
(Left: Commercial DVD; Right: My recording from DTV)

Example 3
(Left: Commercial DVD; Right: My recording from DTV)

That's right: the DVD release is considerably more filtered than what was broadcast on BBC1. Obviously, there are considerably more compression artefacts in the captures taken from my off-air recordings - that's not surprising, given the notoriously shoddy standard of BBC's encoding (BBC1 has a fixed 6 Mbps bit rate to play around with, so there's really no excuse). I am, however, surprised, by how much more detailed my recordings are. A further black mark against the DVD release is that 2 Entertain have unceremoniously lopped off the "Previously" and "Next week" segments at the start and end of each episode, sometimes incredibly badly: the music has noticeable jump cuts and generally reeks of shoddiness. Is it so unreasonable to expect a complete package when you shell out your hard-earned cash for a TV series that you already helped pay for with your robber baron tax? (Ignoring the fact that I got the DVD for free, and, not being a home-owner, don't pay the robber baron tax.)

The final disc in this package of joy was Optimum's UK release of Dario Argento's Mother of Tears. Audio options are Dolby Digital 5.1 and 2.0 English, with no subtitles, while the only extra is the trailer. Image quality (and I'm aware of sounding increasingly like a broken record here) is not too bad, but not too great either. There's plenty of evidence of ringing as a result of brick wall filtering, and also a massive amount of noise reduction which robs the image of its natural grain. A couple of people who got advance copies of this disc mentioned that the film looked as if it had been shot on digital video, and I see what they mean. I wonder if Medusa's Italian release (which doesn't have any English audio options) looks any better?

This morning, I received an order from DVD Pacific containing the US release of An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. This was an ITV adaptation of P.D. James' novel of the same name (which I'm reading at the moment), starring Helen Baxendale and Annette Crosbie, and the DVD contains all four three-part episodes. My interest was piqued when I discovered that one of the three-parters was written by Barbara Machin, creator of Waking the Dead (the seventh series of which incidentally started tonight), so I decided to pick up this DVD set, fully aware that all four episodes feature standards converted transfers. This is, unfortunately, as far as I'm aware the only release of this programme on DVD, and beggars can't be choosers. I won't start watching till I've finished reading the book, though.

Finally - and this is where my luck with image quality finally changes - I also received a review copy of the US Blu-ray release of Juno. My good friend Peter M. Bracke opines that this is "a fairly good-looking presentation", but as usual I beg to differ. This is definitely the best high definition transfer I've seen from 20th Century Fox so far, bearing in mind that I own fewer of their films than any of the other major studios. The source material is such that it won't make you leap out of your seat, marvelling at all the detail on display, but even so it's an excellent presentation of a fairly low-key, muted-looking film.

Expect full reviews of The Frightened Woman, Holby Blue, Mother of Tears and Juno at DVD Times before very much longer.

Brody goes yellow

Source: ComingSoon.net

Its production has been pushed back and it appears to have lost almost its entire original cast (which included Ray Liotta, Vincent Gallo and Asia Argento), but Dario Argento's latest film, Giallo, looks set to go begin shooting in Turin on May 12th, this time boasting Adrien Brody and Emmanuelle Seigner in the cast. Brody, who will executive produce the film along with Oscar Generale, Claudio Argento, Luis De Val, David Milner, Billy Dietrich, Patricia Eberle, Donald Barton and John Hicks (co-production, anyone?), must be a particularly impressive casting coup for Argento, giving the impression that the maestro may, after several false starts, be about to crack the mainstream, and to tell you the truth I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that.

I must confess that, as happy as I am to hear that Argento is working on another film so soon after Mother of Tears, what I've heard about Giallo doesn't exactly fill me with hope. He's once again working from someone else's pre-written script, again the product of an American duo, Jim Agnew and Sean Keller, and it sounds like this will be very much a nudge-nudge wink-wink "homage" to gialli, albeit hopefully not in the same way that Scream was to the Halloween-inspired slasher movie gravy train. I hope I'm pleasantly surprised, but this sounds a bit ho-hum and fairly pointless for Argento at this stage in his career. I'm yet to be convinced that this will do anything Sleepless didn't already do.

Thoughts on The Maltese Falcon, and various giallo/film noir observations

I had my first proper film noir experience today in the form of John Huston's celebrated 1941 offering, The Maltese Falcon. I don't mean by that that it was the first film noir I'd ever seen, but rather that it was the first time I sat down to watch a film thinking "Right, this is a film noir. What does that mean and how does it manifest itself?"

The Maltese Falcon is currently ranked as the 69th greatest film of all time on IMDB, and, regardless of how much or how little faith you put in such lists (personally, I think they're generally of little value), it's tough to deny that it's difficult to approach any film with that sort of reputation, particularly one that's over 60 years old. How do you even begin to comprehend how it would have been viewed at the time of its release, and how do you begin to appreciate its various innovations in that context, knowing full well that they have now been assimilated into the everyday language of film? The answer is that you don't, unless you possess both a time machine and a means of erasing all of your existing knowledge and preconceptions regarding the type of film in question. The Maltese Falcon is very much a quintessential film noir, but it wouldn't have been seen as such in 1941, given that the movement didn't enjoy its glory period until some years later, and it would take even longer for people to begin actively referring to these as film noirs.

So anyway, did I enjoy The Maltese Falcon? Yes, I did - considerably so, in fact, although, as I find to be the case with many films that are considered the greatest of their respective genres or movements, my enjoyment didn't develop into out and out awe or adulation. I found it consistently witty dialogue-wise and at many points engaging, but there were also several moments for me where things began to sag a bit and my interest started to wane. Each time that happened, a plot development would generally show up in a few minutes to regain my attention, but my overriding reaction was "Yeah, this is a really good film" rather than "Wow, this is one of the greatest films of all time!" (Oh, and a minor criticism: I must admit that the continual continuity flubs, mainly actors changing position between shots, kept taking me out of the drama.) That said, I'm pretty sure my reaction to Deep Red was somewhat similar the first time I saw it, and we all know how highly I regard it now.

Anyway, as I've continued reading up on film noir, the similarities between it and the giallo movement have become all the more pronounced. I'm not sure that much, if any, of this comes from my viewing of The Maltese Falcon, but I thought I'd note a few of my observations regarding the ties between the two movements:

- The giallo began in the late 60s as an offshoot of 30s pulp literature, whereas film noir kicked off more than two decades earlier, in the early 40s, drawing on the influence of 10s/20s German Expressionism (for the visuals) and hard-boiled detective pulp fiction (for the narratives and themes).

- For both movements, there is a broad agreement on what constitutes the key iconography, but no single universally accepted definition. In addition, broadly speaking, it is agreed that neither the giallo nor the film noir constitutes a genre. To describe film noir, Alain Silver uses the word "cycle", which has obvious connotations of time, indicating that the movement is part of a specific period, an is echoed in writing on gialli which uses the Italian word 'filone', used to refer to trends and cycles.

- Key traits include moral ambiguity and sexual motivation, often involving a contemporary urban setting.

- Although there are a number of high profile exceptions (The Maltese Falcon being a case in point), the majority of gialli and film noirs tended to be B-movies, with modest budgets and a lack of major stars.

- Both movements seem to have emerged in times of social and/or political unrest:

-- Literary gialli arrived in the 1930s during the rise of fascism.

-- Filmic gialli emerged during a period of intense violence and terrorism in the early 1970s, and following considerable progress in the women’s emancipation movement.

-- The hard-boiled detective novels which influenced film noir emerged in the US during the Depression of the 1930s.

-- Film noir as a movement took off during the aftermath of the Second World War, and its portrayal of powerful, independent women as dangerous (i.e. the femme fatale) can be seen as representative of the fears of a generation of men who returned from war to find that women had entered the public sector in their absence. The vilification and ultimate destruction of the femme fatale can be argued to constitute an attempt to restore 'order' and return women to what was perceived as their rightful place.

- Shared (partial) roots in German Expressionism: Dario Argento, whose The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) is considered to have sparked the main thrust of the giallo boom, has professed to having been influenced by German Expressionism, particularly the films of F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang.

- In both cases, the 'colour' terminology appears to have been applied retrospectively. 'Film noir', or so says Wikipedia (remind me not to quote that in my bibliography!), was first coined by French critic Nino Frank in 1946, and likewise the term 'giallo' does not appear to have been actively used when the films in question were initially released (trailers which do attempt to classify them tend to use the word 'thrilling', e.g. Deep Red). It may be that the giallo movement's literary origins were only noticed and acknowledged later. (Does anyone know? An investigation of contemporary Italian press publications would probably be needed here.)

- Oh, and Luchino Visconti's Ossessione (1943), referred to by some (e.g. Gary Needham) as the first cinematic giallo, was adapted from James M. Cain's novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, itself adapted in the US in 1946 and considered a major film noir.

DVDs I bought or received in the month of March

• Across the Universe (R0 USA, Blu-ray)
• Atonement (R0 UK, HD DVD)
• Danny the Dog (R0 Japan, Blu-ray)
• Hidden (R2 UK, DVD)
• Lewis: Series One (R2 UK, DVD)
• The New York Ripper: Special Restored Edition (R2 Denmark, DVD)
• Sugar Rush: Series One & Two (R2 UK, DVD)
• Tragic Ceremony (R1 USA, DVD)
   

How Blu are you?

Concluding my Blu-ray Trilogy of Terror™ for today, I thought I'd take a look at upcoming releases that have been announced for the format and put together a list of titles I intend to pick up:

Out now:
- Enchanted (Buena Vista)

March 25th, 2008
- Bonnie and Clyde (Warner) (ORDERED)

April 8th, 2008
- The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (Sony Pictures)

April 14th, 2008
- A Tale of Two Sisters (Tartan)

April 15th, 2008
- Juno (Fox) (REVIEW COPY REQUESTED)

April 22nd, 2008
- The Orphanage (New Line)

April 29th, 2008
- The Golden Compass (New Line)

May 26th, 2008
- Lady Vengeance (Tartan)

July 1st, 2008
- Gangs of New York (Buena Vista)

October 7th, 2008
- Sleeping Beauty (Buena Vista)

Are we completely without morals?

Source: Mobius Home Video Forum

The British Board of Film Censors has just recanted on yet another of their blasphemies, this time giving an 18 rating to the uncut version of Piero Schivazappa's The Frightened Woman (reviewed here as part of my Giallo Project, even though it's technically not a giallo). This film was previously classified in 1998, when it was subjected to 16 seconds of unspecified vandalism. The new release runs for 86 minutes and 3 seconds (PAL), and, according to the information issued by distributor Shameless Screen Entertainment, is approved by Schivazappa himself:

Rebuilding The Frightened Woman has been a labour of love but thanks to the work of genre expert Marc Morris the Shameless version of The Frightened Woman runs at 86m 03secs compared to the 83m 25 secs run time supplied by the licensor.

What became clear as Shameless compared all the known versions of The Frightened Woman was that various moments had been lost at different points in all of them. Some were merely shaved seconds; others changed the nuance of a scene or missed out important footage. These have been more than enough to prompt fans on the web to start cataloguing the differences with a prime example being this thread on the respected DVD Maniacs forum:

http://www.dvdmaniacs.net/forums/showthrea...rightened+woman

In order to create this new Shameless version they have used a wide variety of source materials that widely vary in quality but they believe that the end result shows off the film in the complete form it has long deserved to be celebrated in including the correct colour palette.

Shameless have kept director Piero Schivazappa informed throughout the process and asked him to watch through it for them and see if he could give it his seal of approval. He kindly sat through it, with script in hand and felt that, "it is as faithful as it can be to the original script", and was very happy to see the film brought back to life in this Shameless version declaring, "This IS the version of my film to watch."

Shameless Screen Entertainment will release The Frightened Woman on DVD at £12.99 on 14th April, 2008. The Shameless director approved cut will run at 86m 03secs and is being released uncut by the BBFC for the first time in the UK. Presentation of the film is in restored 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen with a restored 2.0 mono soundtrack. The DVD includes an original theatrical trailer.

I shall definitely be picking up a copy. I'm just glad I held out and can now replace my grimy VHS-sourced dupe.

Happy Chocolate Egg Day, by the way.

We changed our minds

Source: Mobius Home Video Forum

The British Board of Film Censors are on quite a roll lately. Back in January, Aldo Lado's exploitation shocker Night Train Murders was finally passed for release in the UK with all previous cuts waived, and now, it's the turn of the film which spawned it, Wes Craven's The Last House on the Left. Craven's film has long been something of a Video Nasty poster child, a prominent item on the DPP list, not granted a UK release until May 2003, and only then with 31 seconds of cuts.

Well, gee whiz, it's great and all that the BBFC have now decided that the film has suddenly stopped being likely to "deprave and corrupt", but wouldn't it have been nice if they'd reached this conclusion in the first place? For example, they could have made up their minds that it wasn't a "threat" before more or less anyone with any interest in seeing the film already did so via the black market or by importing a copy from a less suppressed country. They might also have decided this before the previous UK rights holder, Blue Underground, frittered away a considerable amount of money in their appeal against the BBFC's ruling of 16 seconds of cuts. (When their case was thrown out, the BBFC enacted gleeful revenge by demanding a further 15 seconds of cuts.)

It's nice to know that these people have such a vested interest in our safety, isn't it? Why, if it wasn't for them, I might have seen The Last House on the Left uncut before the date of March 17th 2008, when it would no doubt have scarred me permanently. Luckily, though, I now feel safe in the knowledge that, watching it after March 17th, it will no longer hold any power to deprave and corrupt.

Now that it has been granted an 18 "certificate" (note that I put "certificate" in quotation marks because I believe the term is a misnomer, falsely conveying the notion that the big red logo on the DVD cover is some sort of award), you can expect to see it in your local HMV or Zammo (or whatever the fuck Virgin is called now) among copies of other former training videos for rapists and murderers such as The Evil Dead, Tenebrae and The Exorcist.

For those who are interested in this sticky subject, I suggest reading this article from Mark Kermode (who gave evidence at the appeal in defence of the argument that the film should be granted an uncut release).

(Oh, and they banned Murder Set Pieces at roughly the same time that they passed The Last House on the Left. Good to know that these bobbies are still patrolling their turf.)

DVD review: Tragic Ceremony

It's difficult to recommend Tragic Ceremony to all but the most dedicated collectors of European cult cinema. While labels such as Dark Sky are to be commended for salvaging so many rare and forgotten titles, this is one case where I'm not convinced that the effort was actually worth it. About the strongest case I can make for this release is that I found the Camille Keaton interview to be a delight which almost made the film itself worth slogging through. Almost.

I yawn my way through Tragic Ceremony, a plodding and ineptly made Italian shocker starring Camille "I Spit on Your Grave" Keaton. Review courtesy of DVD Pacific.

A tragedy of a film

Yesterday, I received my review copy of Dark Sky Films' long-delayed release of Riccardo Freda's Tragic Ceremony. As many of you will know, this DVD was originally supposed to be released over a year ago, but was held back due to rights issues. These appear to have been resolved now, but I would urge those who want a copy of this film to get their orders... although, to be honest, given how weak the film is, I'm going to have a hard time recommending it. The best I can say about it is that it provides an interesting opportunity to see Camille Keaton, of What Have You Done to Solange? and I Spit on Your Grave fame, playing yet another ethereal and wide-eyed damsel. Really, I'm not surprised Freda reportedly disowned the end product (the director's credit goes to "Robert Hampton"), as it's actually worse than his limp giallo, The Iguana with the Tongue of Fire.

Presentation-wise, the transfer is really not all that satisfying. It's anamorphic and progressively flagged, and looks passable once the opening credits are over, but lacks detail and has an overly contrasty look, with poor shadow detail and blown-out highlights. I initially assumed that this was simply what the film looked like, but the theatrical trailer included on the disc shows a much better tonal range, not to mention offering more detail (despite being non-anamorphic and not properly flagged for progressive scan):

Above: the film itself;
Below: the trailer
(click images to view them at their full size)

Oh, and the infamous Dark Sky cropping issue, pointed out to me by a regular reader of this site (thanks, Jeff), appears to be present here, at least in certain shots:

The image above is the most severe instance of overly tight framing that I could find. By and large, I didn't find it to be bothersome on any other occasions, although this may be down to the fact that much of Freda's camerawork is so haphazard anyway that, for the most part, framing is a non-issue. It wouldn't surprise me if this film turned out to have an intended ratio of 1.66:1 and was over-matted to 1.85:1 for this DVD.

I should also say a few words on the issue of the sound. The only audio track provided here is an Italian one, although it's clear, from the actors' lip movements, that this one was shot in English (and post-dubbed, of course). In any event, the film is (laughably) supposed to take place somewhere in England, as evinced by several references to Scotland Yard, names like Lord Alexander, and a currency amusingly referred to as "sterling" (as in "You owe me fifty sterling"). Generally, with Italian films from this period, no "original" audio track exists, so I tend not to be too picky about which language is provided. On this occasion, however, the lack of English dubbing is rather problematic, although I do understand the reasoning behind it: apparently, the Italian cut of the film is dramatically different from the version exhibited in the US, so cobbling together a complete English dub would be impossible.

I really enjoyed the Camille Keaton interview, though - considerably more than the film itself, in fact. It was nice to see someone so obviously proud of her achievements and eager to talk about them.

Expect a full review at DVD Times in the near future.

Mother of all cover designs

Cover art for the UK release of Dario Argento's Mother of Tears, due out on April 28th from Optimum, has appeared online at various retailers, including Amazon.co.uk. It's quite a classy design, for once, similar to the artwork used for the cover of Variety's Cannes Film Festival 2007 issue, albeit tinted red.

According to John White over at DVD Maniacs, who has seen a check disc, it's bare-bones barring a trailer, and has a 2.39:1 anamorphic transfer with English Dolby Digital 5.1 audio. Given that it looks like the upcoming Italian release is dubbed into Italian (a good 90% of the dialogue you hear in the film is what was spoken on set by the actors in English), and the currently available Russian release is cropped to 1.78:1, this release would appear to be the one to get.

Eye of the ripper

A few quick words on the Another World Entertainment release of The New York Ripper, which arrived today:

First and foremost, the source for the transfer appears to be the same one that was used for the Australian release from Stomp Visual. Based on the screenshots posted with HorrorDVDs.com's review, I had assumed that the source was different, primarily due to how much more saturated they appear, but I suspect that the person who captured them had his/her DVD playback software's saturation set too high.

Having compared the Stomp Visual and Another World Entertainment transfers fairly thoroughly, I'd go so far as to say that there's really nothing to call either way - both look identical, and I did 600% magnifications of several screen captures. AWE's release does, however, gain several points in its favour for including the scene in which Dr. Davis plays a trick on his secretary, which was omitted from the Stomp release. On the AWE DVD, this scene is sourced from the Anchor Bay DVD and is NTSC-to-PAL standards converted, but it's better than nothing (it could still have been handled better, though - a proper adjustment of the frame rate should have been carried out rather than a video standards conversion).

Another major boon for the AWE release is the fact that it ports over several of the bonus features from the 2-disc French Collector's Edition, along with optional English subtitles. Not everything has made it over, but there is a decent amount of material here - enough to keep you occupied for a while.

Ultimately, the AWE release gets my thumbs-up. As far as I can tell, it's the best release of the film to date. Perfect? No, certainly not. There's certainly room for improvement as far as image quality is concerned (although detail-wise is very nice), and it's a shame the extras package is incomplete. But AWE's efforts to port over some of the material, and to assemble a complete cut of the film (even if the added footage could have been handled better) is appreciated.

Eye slicing never looked more lovely

I was browsing through some of the reviews at HorrorDVDs.com the other night, and I suddenly noticed something: Another World Entertainment's release of Lucio Fulci's The New York Ripper has a really nice transfer. Personally, I always appreciate it when a review includes full size screen captures, because it means that, whatever the words might say, I can trust my own eyes and have a fairly good idea of what the transfer will actually look at without having to put a whole lot of faith in reviewers whose credentials are unknown to me.

Today, while doing a bit of shopping at Xploited Cinema, in the form of the Italian genre cinema book Esotika Erotika Psicotika, primarily for my PhD work, I decided to bite the bullet and order this, my third copy of Fulci's notorious Video Nasty. It's not my favourite of Fulci's films by a long shot (I still maintain that A Lizard in a Woman's Skin is his best work), but it's unjustly maligned and is, if not in the "very good" category of gialli, at least in the upper echelons of "good".

Thank you for the screenshots, HorrorDVDs. You've just earned Another World Entertainment another sale!

They're at it again

"Great" news, folks - those much-vaunted Suspiria remake plans have resurfaced and are once again doing the rounds. This project has cropped up so many times and in so many different guises in the last couple of years that I'm now fairly confident that it will, thankfully, probably never see the light of day, but I still feel compelled to report on the latest buzz surrounding this travesty.

Today, courtesy of the MTV Movies Blog and Shock Till You Drop, I introduce you to David Gordon Green, the man best known for such southern coming of age hits as George Washington and All the Real Girls. The perfect choice, I'm sure you'll agree, to stamp his own distinctive mark on a horror classic, particularly given his plans to turn this "low budget Italian 70's gore movie" into "a pretty amazing, ambitious, artistic (version)".

Um, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't there already a pretty amazing, ambitious, artistic film called Suspiria?

The writers of the articles in question seem to have a lot more respect for the original than Green does. The MTV piece describes it as "an indisputable horror classic" (and I detect a hint of sarcasm in the discussion of the choice of director for this proposed remake), whereas Green, with his "oooh, aaah, I'm going to take this weird little low budget gore movie and turn it into Art, but I've got so many other ideas for projects so you might have to wait for a while before you can bask in the glory of my creativity" attitude, does indeed come across as a smarmy git. If he loves the original so much, I can't for the life of me fathom why he would want to remake it.

It might not be the next thing on Green's plate to direct since he has a lot of ideas including a big-budget action movie, adapting John Grisham's non-fiction book "An Innocent Man" and a "medieval project."

It certainly wouldn't be Green's last venture into horror if the other idea he told us about comes to fruition. "I'd also like to start a straight-to-video action company that just does genre movies. Me and my friend Darius just finished the script called "One in the Chamber." It's just a guy going to get his kidnapped son out of prison. Give me a couple million bucks to go explore some schlock. I'd like to be the next Roger Corman. He would have his hand in freakin' 'Piranha' but also in Fellini. I like that idea. I would love to do some genre stuff but also some crazy intimate, no-budget movies. That's my problem. I only have one me, and I have a limited number of years before I die, and the biggest problem is that I like to do a lot of stuff that has nothing to do with movies and movies are very time-consuming, so you have to make choices, and that's really frustrating."

Boy, this guy has so many "ideas" I'm surprised his head isn't bursting. It must be hard being so creative.

Blue obscurities

So far, the line-up for Blu-ray titles this year has been fairly underwhelming. Things do seem to be changing, though, with the format being bolstered by the support of independent studios specialising in niche fare. Today, Tartan announced their plans for Spring 2008 with a total of six releases in both the US and UK, beginning with Ji-woon Kim's A Tale of Two Sisters and Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park on April 14th, followed by Park Chan-Wook's I'm a Cyborg and [Sympathy for] Lady Vengeance on May 26th, and finally Nick Cave's The Proposition and Moon-saeng Kim's Sky Blue (known in its native South Korea as Wonderful Days) on June 23rd.

You can certainly sign me up for A Tale of Two Sisters, which I already own on DVD, and Lady Vengeance, which I'm now glad I held off picking up. I might also be tempted by a copy of Sky Blue, particularly if it's a review sample: the film itself is, to be honest, about as limp as a dead kipper, but the prospect of seeing the admittedly impressive live action miniature photography is rather promising.

Oh, and New Line is releasing the Guillermo Del Toro-produced The Orphanage (El Orfanato in its native Spanish) on April 22nd, day and date with the standard definition DVD release. This is another title that has caught my eye and is clawing its way towards my wallet.

It's funny if it's not you

For some reason, it seemed as if everybody had seen Juno except me. This offbeat, heart-warming tale about unwanted pregnancy and surrogate parenting appeared out of nowhere, catapulting its star, Ellen Page, and its first-time screenwriter, the intriguingly named Diablo Cody, to centre stage. Of course, it didn't hurt that it bagged itself an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. So, today, I had the opportunity to see it for myself and find out whether the hype was justified.

The answer, in reality, is probably "no". I wouldn't call it the greatest film of the last year by any stretch of the imagination, but, at the same time, it's hard to deny that I enjoyed it considerably. What I liked about this film is that, although superficially the plot is straight out of Movie of the Week territory, it does an admirable job of avoiding sentimentality or mawkishness.

Highlight below to reveal spoiler text:

I can't say I was particularly enamoured by many of the characters, though. I found the script to be incredibly smug and, occasionally, verging on obnoxious, with the dialogue often sounding like an imitation of the sort of speech patterns that were to be found in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and yes, it's true, everyone in this film more or less does speak with the same "voice"). The whole thing is a massive overdose of pop culture references and calculatedly "quirky" dialogue... oh, and I can only put Juno's summation that Herschell Gordon Lewis' The Wizard of Gore is a better film than Suspiria down to the assumption that being pregnant does strange things to your system. I'm still slightly amazed to hear the name of Dario Argento actually being spoken in a mainstream film, though.

I did enjoy it overall. I wouldn't class it as a masterpiece, but it's fun and at times quite amusing - one of the few feel-good films I can think of that doesn't make me want to go and throw up afterwards.

Oh yeah, and has anyone seen this video? I must confess it made me laugh more than the film itself. ("Oscar, I smell ya later!")

DVDs I bought or received in the month of February

• Almost Famous (R0 UK, Blu-ray)
• American Gangster (R0 USA, HD DVD)
• Astérix et les Vikings (R0 France, HD DVD)
• The Brave One (R0 USA, Blu-ray)
• Gone Baby Gone (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• The Lady Vanishes: The Criterion Collection [2007 re-release] (R1 USA, DVD)
• La Môme (R0 France, Blu-ray)
• The Night of the Werewolf/Vengeance of the Zombies (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• Run Lola Run (R0 UK, Blu-ray)
• Volver (RA USA, Blu-ray)
   

Blu Underground

Source: Film Talk

Well, this has got to be just about the most unexpected piece of news to round off the month, but perhaps also the most pleasant. Blue Underground, who hold the US DVD rights to most of Dario Argento's catalogue, not to mention a vast sea of other European cult titles, have added a placeholder page to their web site announcing their intentions to get into the high definition market in the near future:

We are proud to announce that a number of high definition Blu-ray™ releases are in the works. We will have more information soon.

There we go - there's no actual information besides their statement of an intention to release on the format, but I must say I'm absolutely thrilled. I pretty much gave up any hope of seeing the likes of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Deep Red, Suspiria and Inferno in HD any time soon after the rights to these films ended up at Blue Underground and various statements came from the company indicating that they didn't perceive the market to be large enough to make HD releases viable. I can't wait to see what their first titles are, and it goes without saying that they should constitute a sizeable improvement on the filtered, edge enhanced standard definition transfers that Blue Underground routinely put out.

My most wanted titles:

• Baba Yaga
• The Bird with the Crystal Plumage
• Deep Red
• Don't Torture a Duckling
• The Fifth Cord
• Inferno
• Night Train Murders
• Opera
• Short Night of the Glass Dolls
• Suspiria
• The Stendhal Syndrome
• Who Saw Her Die?

Now, obviously, I'm not naïve enough to assume that anything approaching all of these titles will show up, but if even a handful of them get the HD treatment, I will be a very happy gentleman.

Garbage baby garbage

Yesterday, I received a copy of the US Blu-ray release of Gone Baby Gone from DeepDiscount. I watched it tonight, and was less than impressed.

This film gained some level of notoriety in the UK when distributor Buena Vista cancelled its theatrical release, which was scheduled uncomfortably soon after the disappearance of British child Madeleine McCann, and I must confess that my interest in seeing it, while due primarily from the positive write-ups it received, did to some extent stem from the parallels drawn between the McCann case and the one portrayed in the film. (Perhaps Buena Vista's marketing department should have made a donation to the Maddy fund for the free publicity?) And the parallels are quite striking. Not only does the missing child, Amanda McCready, bear a great deal of physical resemblance to Madeleine McCann, the circumstances surrounding her disappearance are similar: in both cases, a neglectful mother left her child alone in an apartment to get wasted (Kate McCann on alcohol, Helene McCready on cocaine) at a local bar, and later lied about the length of time for which she had abandoned the child. In both cases, a toy belonging to the missing child becomes a vital piece of iconography. And finally, in both, frustrated by the police's lack of progress, the family of the missing child hires private investigators.

Unfortunately, the most significant similarity between the two cases is how annoying they both are. The media furore surrounding the McCann disappearance, and the manner in which her parents shamelessly and (I believe) insincerely manipulated the media, made me gag. The mawkishness and falseness of the front they adopted was irritating in the extreme, and, unfortunately, Gone Baby Gone is every bit as mawkish and false. This is a film which doesn't just tug at the heartstrings - it claws desperately at them, using every cliché in the book in a desperate bid to make the audience care about what is, ultimately, a dull, confused and poorly plotted story.

More annoying than all of that, however, is Casey Affleck, who delivers all his dialogue (most of which seems to be about "respec'") in the same deadpan mumble and is virtually incomprehensible half of the time. This film was co-written and directed by his older brother, Ben Affleck, and I can only assume that this proves that nepotism is alive and well in Hollywood. Similar criticisms are sometimes made of Dario Argento when he casts his daughter in his films, but Asia Argento seems to have a better grasp of English than Casey Affleck and is considerably less annoying to boot. Ed Harris, meanwhile, stumbles over his ridiculous dialogue as best he can, and Michelle Monaghan's role is so pointless that I wouldn't be surprised if it was written in minutes before shooting began because the producers realised, at the last minute, that it would look rather bad if all the women in the film were drug addicts and/or negligent parents. I like both of these actors, I really do, but there's a limit to what they can do without a worthwhile script. The only actor to escape with any sense of self-respect is Morgan Freeman, who I tend to find elevates the perceived quality of just about any material he gets his hands on.

In short, I don't rate Ben Affleck as an actor, and, based on this, he isn't much better as a director or writer (bearing in mind that I haven't seen Good Will Hunting). It's definitely one of the weakest films I've picked up in high definition since its inception, and definitely not worth the $27 I paid for it. Oh, well - you win some, you lose some.