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Insights from home entertainment industry experts. Home Media blogs give you the inside scoop on entertainment news, DVD and Blu-ray Disc releases, and the happenings at key studios and entertainment retailers. TK's Take analyzes and comments on home entertainment industry news and trends, Agent DVD Insider talks comic adaptations, and IndieFile delivers independent film news.

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November 16, 2009
James Toback’s ‘Two Girls and a Guy’ Features ‘Best’ Downey Performance

Two Girls and a Guy

Writer-director James Toback’s Two Girls and a Guy is one of the lost great movies of the 1990s. What might appear as a “Friends”-era sterile romantic comedy is actually as far removed from that as possible, full of nasty acts of duplicity and retribution and a faked suicide and an ‘NC-17’-worthy love scene (which really looks SO tame by today’s standards). But it’s still being very much of that era, exploring those “Sex in the ’90s” sexual mores like bisexuality and polyamorous relationships similarly explored in movies like Threesome while retaining the talkiness and headiness of films like Before Sunrise.

But likely the reason people will seek Two Girls and a Guy on Blu-ray Disc, recently released by Fox, is Robert Downey Jr.

“It was increasingly frustrating to me, given the absurd nature of the network of distribution and dissemination of movies today, that a movie that contained by far the best performance of an actor who is generally considered as good as any actor working today, to say nothing of the fact that the movie had all kind of acclaim over the years, that the film was largely unavailable,” Toback said of releasing the film on Blu-ray.

Toback approached 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment president Mike Dunn about releasing the film, and he was on board for releasing it on Blu-ray.

“I think anyone who’s seen Blu-ray will never again be able to look at DVD the same way again,” Toback said. “It is as big an improvement over DVD as HD television is over regular television and as big an advance as DVD was over VHS. We’re talking about an exponential leap in quality of sound, richness of color, precision of image … it’s impossible not to feel that there’s been a great discovery achieved.”

The Blu-ray Disc has a new conversation with Toback about the film in which he reveals the degree of improvisation he employed in the film, in particular with some of Downey’s more intense scenes. This is a chance to see Downey away from the respectable, post-addiction, Iron Man suit wearing (but still great) Downey of today and back when he was unhinged and ad libbing on set in weird, scary ways.

“It was very clear to me from the time he did that movie … that his skills are capable of full fruition and display in a movie only if you allow him to try what he wants to try and if you give him stuff that’s challenging and interesting,” Toback said. “When you give him stuff that excites him, he will be absolutely dazzling.

“Right now he’s in the franchise business, and that’s another racket and he’s carrying it off about as well as anyone’s carrying it off in the world. The Downey I worked with in Two Girls and a Guy is not the Downey that’s around today. He’s a different character.

“… I think he’s [now] doing what he wants to do and he’s getting extremely rich and extremely famous and … after being humiliated in an awful way in prison … I think he’s enjoying his success and his fame and his money and his marriage, and I say go with it.”

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September 17, 2009
December Criterion Titles Include Akira Kurosawa Set

Title: AK 100: 25 Films By Akira Kurosawa
Street Date: 12/8
Prebook Date: 11/10
Studio: Criterion
Price/Format: DVD $399
Reserve for purchase

Criterion is pulling out the big guns in December, releasing an ambitious, 25-film set from Akira Kurosawa to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of the legendary Japanese director. The linen-bound set includes an illustrated book with an introduction by Stephen Prince (The Warrior’s Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa) and notes on each film and a remembrance by Donald Richie (Films of Akira Kurosawa). It includes restored digital transfers of the following films:

The Bad Sleep Well (1960)
Dodes’ka-den (1970)
Drunken Angel (1948)
The Hidden Fortress (1958)
High and Low (1963)
I Live in Fear (1955)
The Idiot (1951)
Ikiru (1952)
Kagemusha (1980)
The Lower Depths (1957)
Madadayo (1993)
The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail (1945)*
The Most Beautiful (1944)*
No Regrets for Our Youth (1946)
One Wonderful Sunday (1947)
Rashomon (1951)
Red Beard (1965)
Sanjuro (1962)
Sanshiro Sugata (1943)*
Sanshiro Sugata, Part II (1944)*
Scandal (1950)
Seven Samurai (1954)
Stray Dog (1949)
Throne of Blood (1957)
Yojimbo (1961)

*previously unreleased on DVD


Title: Gimme Shelter
Street Date: 12/1
Prebook Date: 11/3
Studio: Criterion
Price/Format: Blu-ray $39.95
Reserve for purchase

This new high-definition digital transfer of 30th anniversary version of the notorious 1969 Rolling Stones tour film is remastered and restored from the camera original and has a DTS-HD master audio soundtrack, exclusive Dolby Digital and DTS 5.1 surround-sound mixes, commentary with directors Albert Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin and collaborator Stanley Goldstein, backstage outtakes and more. This edition also includes a booklet with essays by Mick Jagger’s former assistant Georgia Bergman, music writers Michael Lydon and Stanley Booth, and film critics Amy Taubin and Godfrey Cheshire.

Title: A Christmas Tale (DATE CHANGE)
Street Date: 12/1
Prebook Date: 11/3
Studio: Criterion
Price/Format: DVD or Blu-ray $39.95
Reserve for purchase (DVD)

Catherine Deneuve stars as the matriarch of a troubled family at Christmas.

Additionally, the release dates of Criterion’s October titles have been changed (see the releases and new dates here).

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September 16, 2009
‘Stop Making Sense’ Marks 25th Anniversary With Blu-ray Release

Street Date: 10/13
Studio: Palm Pictures
Price/Format: DVD $34.99
Reserve for purchase

You may find yourself owning a totally awesome new version of Stop Making Sense when Palm Pictures releases it on Blu-ray Disc Oct. 13, celebrating the 25th anniversary of Jonathan Demme’s Talking Heads concert film. The 1984 film was shot by the Silence of the Lambs director at the Pantages Theater in Hollywood in December of 1983, as the band promoted its album Speaking in Tongues. The Blu-ray is going to include never-before-seen footage (I’m sure someone has seen it, but probably not you and I), including a previously unavailable 1999 press conference with all four members of the band, the video short “David Byrne Interview … David Byrne” and two songs not included in the film (I’m guessing these were the same two, “Big Business/I Zimbra” and “Cities,” included on the DVD). The tracklist of the film is as follows:

1. Psycho Killer
2. Heaven
3. Thank You for Sending Me an Angel
4. Found a Job
5. Slippery People
6. Burning Down the House
7. Life During Wartime
8. Making Flippy Floppy
9. Swamp
10. What a Day That Was
11. This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)
12. Once in a Lifetime
13. Genius of Love
14. Girlfriend is Better
15. Take Me to the River
16. Crosseyed and Painless
 

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September 14, 2009
Icarus Bows Chantal Akerman’s Travelogue-Style ‘From the East’

Street Date: 10/6
Studio: Icarus Films
Price/Format: DVD $29.98
Reserve for purchase
Reserve on Netflix

Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman (From the Other Side) takes a journey through Eastern Europe, from East Germany across Poland and the Baltics to Moscow, in From the East (D’Est). From the end of summer through winter, Akerman films her travels, made shortly after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, and the resulting film has no dialogue and no commentary; rather, it makes her travels into a soundscape consisting of the noise and voices around her. The 1993 film was salivated over by every hoity-toity this side of the Atlantic (New York Times, Chicago Reader, Village Voice etc.). I can’t say that I’ve ever heard of another film like it; the closest thing that comes to mind is something like Agnes Varda’s The Gleaners and I or a human version of Winged Migration. The DVD includes a booklet with an essay by Akerman.

 

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August 17, 2009
Sony Slates William Castle, Samuel Fuller Collections

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment is giving cult-film fans two reasons to celebrate, come October.

Ballyhoo master William Castle gets the boxed-set treatment Oct. 20 will The William Castle Film Collection. The $80.95 set includes new-to-DVD films The Tingler (1959), 13 Ghosts (1960), Homicidal (1961), Mr. Sardonicus (1961) and Strait-Jacket (1964), along with previously released Zotz! (1962), The Old Dark House (1963) and 13 Frightened Girls (1963). 

Meanwhile influential director Samuel Fuller, who is said to have helped inspire the likes of Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and Jim Jarmusch, will have his films released in The Collector’s Choice: Samuel Fuller Film Collection at $79.95.  It’s the third release under the partnership between SPHE and Scorsese’s The Film Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to film preservation. DVD debuts in the set include It Happened in Hollywood (1937), Adventure in Sahara (1938), Power of the Press (1943), Shockproof (1949), Scandal Sheet (1952), The Crimson Kimono (1959), and Underworld U.S.A. (1961). Special features include “Martin Scorsese on Underworld U.S.A,” “Curtis Hanson: The Culture of The Crimson Kimono,” and “Sam Fuller's Search for Truth with Tim Robbins” and “Sam Fuller Storyteller.”

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