From its Manhattan offices, the Criterion Collection now fashions special-edition DVDs that set the standard for the industry while rescuing from the vaults classic films such as Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game (1939) and creating filmmaker-approved versions of modern movies, including Steven Soderbergh's Traffic.
"In terms of extras and commentaries, many of those were their innovations," says filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, who started his American Zoetrope DVD lab that produced The Godfather and One from The Heart DVDs. "We admire them and try to live up to the standard they are known for."
:: posted by Donald Melanson, 6/29/2004 | Comments (0) Links to this post |
Monday, June 28, 2004

Cinematically the giallo, even from the earliest Bava-films up to Dario Argento's latest, has always been highly stylised. Much attention is paid to photography and editing, which renders most gialli exciting mise-en-scene and narrative structures. Experiments with point-of-view-shots are common and much work often go into the murder scenes which unlike in most horror/thriller cinema have an active part in the story's development and in the portraying of the killer. The soundtrack also plays a vital part in most gialli. Like in the spaghetti westerns the soundtracks often feature a series of themes. For instance the murderer often has his/hers theme and sometimes different ones to underscore the emotional state of him/her. Psychology is always an important factor in the giallo and there is often music to emphasise it. For instance in Dario Argento's Deep Red (Profundo Rosso, 1975) the murderer even carries around a tape recorder with music to evoke the murderous feelings. All this of course makes for a highly cinematic genre, and sometimes it's impossible to see how a literary genre inspired it all.(via Bitter Cinema)
:: posted by Donald Melanson, 6/28/2004 | Comments (0) Links to this post |
Friday, June 25, 2004
:: posted by Donald Melanson, 6/25/2004 | Comments (0) Links to this post |
Thursday, June 24, 2004
1. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
2. Vertigo (1958)
3. Citizen Kane (1941)
4. Blade Runner (1982)
5. King Kong (1933)
6. Third Man, The (1949)
7. Sherlock, Jr. (1924)
8. Once Upon a Time in the West (1969)
9. Night of the Hunter, The (1955)
10. Manchurian Candidate, The (1962)
11. Singin' in the Rain (1952)
12. The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
13. Sunset Blvd. (1950)
14. Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
15. Casablanca (1942)
16. Maltese Falcon, The (1941)
17. Searchers, The (1956)
18. Taxi Driver (1976)
19. Pulp Fiction (1994)
20. Conversation, The (1974)
If you make your own top 20 at YMDb, post a link to it in the comments area.
:: posted by Donald Melanson, 6/24/2004 | Comments (0) Links to this post |
Tuesday, June 22, 2004
In fact, their films have been hotbeds of fortean technology, introducing then-taboo ideas, preparing audiences for technological development in a world in which moral and scientific values would change and old taboos would be discarded. The movies render such taboo topics psychologically "safe" by making the inventions those of "madmen."
:: posted by Donald Melanson, 6/22/2004 | Comments (0) Links to this post |
Monday, June 14, 2004

I reviewed two very different 60s science fiction series in Mindjack today: The Prisoner & Thunderbirds.
Only a decade ago, the notion of owning an entire television series was an uncommon one - reserved mostly for Trekkies and other really obsessive fans. But now some of the best selling DVDs are regularly TV series.
These are usually divided into individual season sets, costing anywhere from $40 to over $100. But DVDs seem particularly well suited to short-lived TV series. Sure, you can own the entire run of The X-Files if you want, but it'll cost almost a grand. Series that only lasted a season or two, however, generally cost around $100 or less.
A&E Home Video has latched onto this market, releasing a number of short-lived cult television series on DVD. Two of the series that I was most interested in are shows on opposite ends of the 60s science fiction spectrum: The Prisoner and Thunderbirds.
:: posted by Donald Melanson, 6/14/2004 | Comments (0) Links to this post |
Saturday, June 12, 2004
:: posted by Donald Melanson, 6/12/2004 | Comments (0) Links to this post |
Friday, June 11, 2004
It would be nice if movies were always made the way they are in Truffaut's "Day for Night," with idealism and romance, or Minnelli's "The Bad and the Beautiful," with glamor and intrigue. But sometimes they are made the way they are in Mario Van Peebles' "Baadasssss!" -- with desperation, deception and cunning. Here is one of the best movies I've seen about the making of a movie -- a fictionalized eyewitness account by Mario of how and why his father, Melvin Van Peebles, made "Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song," a landmark in the birth of African-American cinema.
Though it's limited distrubition probably means I'll have to wait for the DVD.
:: posted by Donald Melanson, 6/11/2004 | Comments (3) Links to this post |
Wednesday, June 09, 2004
Your budget was a little smaller on this one, yes?
Kind of (laughs). It depends on who you talk to. Some people say that the original was between $90 and $100 million, and ours was just under $6 million. It's a big difference.
The limited budget - as the film buffs we are, we immediately realized that this had to be a horror film. We always said that if Starship Troopers was Aliens, this one was Alien. It wasn't going to be as good as a Ridley Scott picture, but it was going to be 10 Little Indians in a haunted house. That was just a given. We started from that premise and realized that we weren't going to have something that was spectacle upon spectacle upon spectacle. We have to deliver that, as well, but we had to be conscious of what we could do.
:: posted by Donald Melanson, 6/09/2004 | Comments (0) Links to this post |

And the DVD is simply incredible for the price (less than 12 bucks at Amazon). The transfer is wonderful and the extras as as good as those on discs costing three times as much. On two discs, you get three documentaries (really one split in three parts), a short featurette on railroads and the west, and a commentary featuring John Carpenter, Alex Cox, Leone biographer Christopher Frayling, and others. There's lots of Criterion discs that aren't nearly as good as this.
:: posted by Donald Melanson, 6/09/2004 | Comments (0) Links to this post |
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