New on Disc: 'The Big Heat' and more …

The Big Heat

Available via ScreenArchives.com
Twilight Time, Drama, $29.95 Blu-ray, NR.
Stars Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame, Lee Marvin, Alexander Scourby.
1953. As character motivation goes, the movie often cited as the best of Fritz Lang’s Hollywood output must have one of the most convincingly brass-tacks explanations of them all. Direct from having ruffled the feathers of an unnamed city’s “Mr. Big,” here’s hardheaded cop Glenn Ford engaged in a benign daddy-talk respite with his very young daughter just as mommy steps on the driveway gas pedal on her way to go pick up the babysitter. Hear mommy go “Ka-boom!” (and neighborhood property values presumably plummet). But really, the detective-sergeant Ford’s playing wasn’t all that happy about the way things were going even before the explosion. This is a movie where just about everyone in town is under the thumb of an outwardly clean power broker (Alexander Scourby), whose cotillion-type offspring and their friends (whose placid party Ford invades in one memorable scene) are above the grimy fray and likely all members of Eddie Fisher’s fan club. It’s significant that in The Big Heat’s most famous scene — Scourby henchman Lee Marvin throwing scalding liquid into the face of his supposed girlfriend Gloria Grahame — the wuss who’s ordered to get the poor woman to the hospital is the police commissioner. Sidney Boehm’s tough screenplay is a honey — so tight that this Columbia Pictures gem runs 90 minutes.
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Norman Mailer: The American

Cinema Libre, Documentary, $19.95 DVD, NR.
2010. Forever entertaining, though with less intimidation as he approached his eye-twinkling emeritus stage, proudly Brooklyn-raised Norman Mailer always seemed to be everywhere over the decades. As with writing peers James Jones and Irwin Shaw, Mailer’s formative old-school World War II experiences paved the way for a major postwar novel of “Great American” ambitions, but he was also enough of the then-burgeoning times to become a co-founder of The Village Voice. This biographical portrait by Joseph Mantegna (not the actor) makes 85 minutes go very quickly, though it doesn’t fully tap into how mesmerizing Mailer was to listen to — though, bonus extras that capture him on an array of subjects smooth this gap over some. Nor is it particularly explorative of what Mailer could do with nouns, verbs and adjectives (not that this is easy to do on film), emphasizing instead the writer’s psychological state throughout the years. On this level, the result hits at least a triple, thanks to the almost awe-inspiring on-camera participation of key wives.
Extras: It’s kind of eerie to see Mailer speak of the novel’s decline in importance to the general public — and to predict with a very clear crystal ball what mass computer usage would do to people.
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This Could Be the Night

Available via WBshop.com’s Warner Archive
Warner, Comedy, $17.95 DVD, NR.
Stars Jean Simmons, Anthony Franciosa, Paul Douglas, Julie Wilson.
1957. Director Robert Wise’s mildly eccentric sweetheart of a nightclub comedy essentially plunks Snow White into a bookie den. Kinetically directed and shot (by the great Russell Harlan), Night is a kind of a fairly tale about a moonlighting schoolteacher (Jean Simmons) who takes an unlikely secretarial job at a Manhattan nightspot run by an Italian tomcat who lives over the club (Anthony Franciosa in his screen debut) and a gruff but soft-hearted Prohibition veteran (Paul Douglas) who wants to protect her from lowlifes.
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Cannes 2012 Acquisitions

Film Movement has acquired Room 514 at the Cannes Film Festival. The directorial debut from Sharon Bar-Ziv premiered at the Rotterdam International Film Festival and won a special jury mention for Best New Narrative Director at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival. The film, which is in Hebrew with English subtitles, will see a limited theatrical opening in the Q4 of 2012 with a day-and-date cable VOD premiere.

Please send any Cannes acquisition announcements to bgil@questex.com.

Is Netflix Seeing UltraViolet?

The recent financial industry discussion with the CFO of Netflix shed some light on what the subscription service may be focusing on as it moves into the streaming future. I think it may be seeing competition from UltraViolet, the cloud-based license storage service backed by most of the major studios.

Netflix significantly is not a member of the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE), the consortium of more than 70 members that support UltraViolet. Suddenly, as UltraViolet has had a successful launch in Walmart stores and has racked up 2 million accounts, Netflix CFO David Wells told an investor group the company plans later this year to roll out a subscription plan enabling multiple users within a household to stream content on different devices.

Wells said the upcoming subscription offering with an as-yet undefined price is the result of a growing number of users accessing Netflix from one account at the same time.

Hmmm …

Could that be a response to UltraViolet’s ability to let consumers have up to six household members per account able to access content on up to 12 different devices?

As I have said previously, ownership is a very efficient way to get consumers the movies they want — without making them pay for a bunch of titles (via licensing deals with Netflix) that they don’t ever want to see.

In this recent call, Netflix is making it clear that even within households, different members like different content and want to watch it on different devices — sometimes at the same time as another member in the household.

What model serves consumers’ desire to both watch the content they want and also watch it on the device (TV, tablet, mobile phone) they want — regardless of what other members of their “account” are watching at the same time?

I think UltraViolet may be giving Netflix some headaches in that competition.

Documentary Premieres With Sundance Doc Club

The documentary Walk Away Renee from director Jonathan Caouette will see its digital premiere through SundanceNOW’s new SVOD program, Doc Club, day-and-date with its North American film festival premiere.

Walk Away Renee hits North America June 27 at CAMcinemaFest 2012, while Doc Club subscribers will be able to download or stream the film that same day as part of Doc Club’s June offerings. Additionally the film can be rented on SundanceNOW for $6.99. The film premiered at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival and is the follow-up to Caouette’s 2004 film Tarnation, a harrowing memoir-doc about his life growing up gay and with a mentally ill mother that he famously made for $218.32 using iMovie on his Mac.

Walk Away Renee sees Caouette taking a road trip to move his mentally ill mother across the country, with flashbacks to the past portraying their extraordinary relationship.

“This online premiere of Caouette’s Walk Away Renee is a major step forward for SundanceNOW and Doc Club,” said Jonathan Sehring, president of Sundance Selects and SundanceNOW. “Our mission is to bring films to audiences in multiple ways and create exciting, innovative campaigns for each film. To give fans of Tarnation the ability to watch Jonathan’s new film from any computer in the country is the best way to make it as available as possible.”

SundanceNOW is the digital sister of Sundance Selects, which an arm of the Sundance Film Festival that brings films to 40 million homes via transactional a VOD platform through major cable providers such as Comcast, Cablevision, Cox, Time Warner Cable and DirecTV, as well as theatrically and on disc and digital download.

Seeing Tarnation on DVD when it was first released, I was stricken by how it was like no movie I had ever seen before. Viewers with the utmost stoicism and skepticism, a disposition for which they could be forgiven, knowing Tarnation’s seemingly precious and self-indulgent set-up, have been moved far beyond expectation by Tarnation’s hyperreality — not only is it a film which redefines the documentary, it predated much of social networking and foreshadowed the way Facebook and YouTube give us far more avenue than we could have dreamed for sharing our stories, for better or worse. It remains one of my all-time favorite films, and I’m glad that for his long-awaited follow-up, Caouette has remained ahead of the curve, in terms of the way this film is being brought to audiences.

‘The Beast’ Passes Through Again

The other day I was listening to a report on “The World” about certain Catholic priests in Mexico protecting migrants passing through from Central and South America. They mentioned “La Bestia,” a treacherous cargo train that runs through Mexico to the United States, leaving many dead, maimed or dismembered. 

It immediately reminded me of the 2010 documentary La Bestia (The Beast), which is about that dangerous cargo train. At the time of the DVD’s release, I spoke with filmmaker Pedro Ultreras about his film and his harrowing stories about riding the train himself in order to capture what it truly was like for these migrants who ride La Bestia. It left quite an impression on me to see and hear about what these migrants suffer through just because they want a better life for themselves

Having watched La Bestia and spoken with Pedro really brought this news segment to life for me, and it painted pictures and details in a way that radio cannot. I sat in my car for a few seconds thinking about how wonderful movies can be no just in entertaining us but in educating us and bringing global issues home as well.

Here, Pedro has documented a situation that few, if any, have been able to. And unfortunately, the film is still relevant today.

A 'Devil' of a Blu-ray Deal

Paramount Home Media Distribution has given Best Buy a number of exclusive Blu-rays of its catalog titles in recent months, such as the May 15 release of Road Trip in HD.

But an exclusive on the Blu-ray for a new theatrical title is much more unusual. Yet that’s the case with The Devil Inside, an early 2012 horror title with a modest box office cume for which the Blu-ray is available only at Best Buy, at $22.99. (Contrast this with Target, which didn't bother advertising the DVD version in its weekly ad circular.)

Best Buy also had a promotion to get $10 Fandango cash to see Battleship or Snow White & the Huntsman with purchase of the Blu-rays for The Kingdom ($7.99), Jarhead, The Mummy or The Scorpion King ($9.99 each). Furthermore, buyers could get a $10 Best Buy gift card with the purchase of any three TV DVD or Blu-ray titles at $14.99 or higher each.

Walmart offered the DVD of The Devil Inside at $14.96 with a bonus digital rental from its Vudu movie-streaming service.

Target offered a promotion touting USA Network shows on DVD, such as “Covert Affairs” and “White Collar.” The chain also had an exclusive DVD of Men in Black: The Animated Series — Season One at $14.99, which includes a $10 coupon for a ticket for the upcoming Men in Black 3.

New on Disc: 'Pillow Talk' on Blu-ray and more …

Pillow Talk (Blu-ray)

Universal, Comedy, $39.98 Blu-ray, NR.
Stars Doris Day, Rock Hudson, Tony Randall, Thelma Ritter.
1959. The first and arguably most prototypical Doris Day “career girl” comedy, Pillow Talk is still pretty funny and definitely a watershed movie, more so than I realized until I took a fresh look at the latest entry in Universal’s ongoing “100th Anniversary Collector’s Series.” Producer Ross Hunter and Day’s famously charlatan producer and husband, Marty Melcher, consciously orchestrated their attractive femme lead’s image-alteration at age 35, casting her as a self-sufficient New York career woman who didn’t need a man and dressing her in smart-to-this-day Jean Louis outfits. For a 1959 comedy that was once cutting edge, it was already dated at the time in one respect due to the shared-telephone-party-line hook that turns total strangers Day and Rock Hudson into adversaries. Though party lines still lingered around in smaller towns, they had pretty well become obsolete in places like New York City. With Hudson’s sexually active songwriter clogging their line with his femme pursuits, Day turns disgusted at him sight unseen — while he mistakenly characterizes her as a gotta-be prune. Then, Hudson actually sees her, changes his tune and quickly moves in on this aspired-to conquest. Pillow Talk established the romantic-comedy template in Hollywood until, say, 1967’s The Graduate.
Extras: It is noted on this release’s rousingly entertaining commentary (carried over from the 50th anniversary DVD, which itself is being reissued May 22) that then Universal-International had to give the picture a New York test run of a couple weeks’ duration to gauge how its then risqué content might play in podunk-ier markets.
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The Red House

Film Chest, Thriller, $15.98 Blu-ray/DVD combo, NR.
Stars Edward G. Robinson, Lon McCallister, Judith Anderson, Allene Roberts.
1947. Long among the more prominent residents of “Public Domain Hell,” this supremely moody backwoods melodrama nonetheless is well-remembered by film fanciers. But every time I tried to watch prints of House in the past, I was put off by the soundtrack’s grating tin, a problem not completely alleviated (but to a good degree, is) in this otherwise most welcome spiff-up by HD Cinema Classics, which is releasing the picture as a Blu-ray/DVD combo that also does fairly good justice to Bert Glennon’s (Stagecoach) cinematography. And there’s an added reason the soundtrack issue is paramount, thanks to the movie’s composer. It was Miklos Rozsa — contributing a fairly famous score at that — back when he was in his delirious The Killers/Spellbound noir mode before going all Robert Taylor/Chuck Heston “Biblical” in the following decade. The lead is Edward G. Robinson as a farmer who lives self-sufficiently out in the woods where even the school bus doesn’t go.
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Run for the Sun

Manufactured on demand via online retailers
MGM, Drama, $19.98 DVD, NR.
Stars Richard Widmark, Jane Greer, Trevor Howard, Peter van Eyck.
1956. The script here — credited to Sun director Roy Boulting and screenwriting royalty Dudley Nichols — takes so many liberties with Richard Connell’s short story perennial The Most Dangerous Game that I didn’t think until this viewing that Sun was anything more than someone’s “unofficial” salvo. Widmark plays a boozy author-adventurer who, along with an undercover magazine reporter palming herself off as a stranded hellhole tourist, crash-land in a Central American fortress and must escape its master (Trevor Howard) through the jungle.
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Microsoft Shouldn't Abandon DVD Playback

I find it most disconcerting that Microsoft will no longer support DVD playback on its next incarnation of operating software, Windows 8.

The House of Gates came under fire recently when it acknowledged the move. Microsoft initially said the move was based on changing consumer habits. As Home Media Magazine noted, “In a May 3 corporate blog post, Microsoft said ‘telemetry data’ and user research suggest consumers primarily consume video on the PC and related mobile devices from streaming sources such as YouTube, Netflix, Amazon and Hulu. … The software giant also cited recent data from IHS that claimed consumption of movies online in the United States will surpass physical video in 2012.”

Microsoft later came back with another argument: in essence, that including DVD playback would be unfair to buyers of ultrabooks and tablets because of royalty costs associated with decoder technology — costs that would be passed on to consumers even if their devices don’t have optical disc drives.

Only the pricier Windows 8 Pro will offer DVD playback, according to Microsoft.

Either Microsoft is simply trying to save a buck, or else drive consumers to buy the more-expensive Windows Pro.

Either way, it’s a disturbing development — and one that feeds right into those who are of the mindset that the physical disc is an antiquated technology and everything is headed into the cloud.

I stand firm in my belief that there will always be a market for a physical product. Some of us like to watch movies on our computers, and welcome the ease and convenience of simply sticking a disc into our laptops — a disc we’ve already paid for, a movie we already own.

And what about home movies we’ve burned to DVD, or slide shows of family photos?

I’ve been waiting patiently for Microsoft to support Blu-ray Disc. I kept waiting for an announcement — and now, this. Microsoft has gone in the opposite direction.

I was an avid Mac user until the early days of the Internet, when some sites couldn’t be accessed on Apple products. That drove me right into PC Land.

Now, I’m thinking about going back to Mac.

Writing on ZDNet, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes sums up my sentiments exactly. “I feel that Microsoft is making a big mistake here,” he writes. “While Apple has a streamlined one-size-fits-all OS X edition that contains everything users need, Microsoft is once again juggling features in order to make the higher-priced edition of Windows more superior and desirable than the cheaper option, while at the same time giving OEMs yet more reason to install third-party crapware onto new systems.”

James Redford, Son of Robert Redford, Talks Whole Foods Film

As a child, James Redford was fascinated by the creation of Lake Powell. He and his family (including famous father Robert Redford, Oscar-feted director/actor and founder of the Sundance Film Festival) would visit there, but he knew it came at the expense of the beautiful Glen Canyon, which was flooded by the Colorado River, which passes through it, after the creation of the Glen Canyon Dam was completed in 1963, a year after Redford was born. Seventeen years later, Lake Powell hit its intended high water mark, completing the creation of Lake Powell.

“It seemed like a shattering tragedy loomed over every subsequent visit to the lake,” Redford said. “But it didn't stop my family from going there. The vast raw beauty of the Southwest shined through. The oddity and, frankly, hubris of manipulating a natural system never left my curiosity.”

Redford produced the film Watershed: Exploring a New Water Ethic for the New West about the human activity surrounding the Colorado River, how the river has receded and what could be done to help the situation. The documentary is narrated by Robert Redford and directed by Mark Decena.

The film is the second entry in this year’s edition of Whole Foods Market’s Do Something Reel Film Festival, which began on Earth Day (April 22) and features films dealing with issues regarding food and the environment. Watershed can be streamed at www.dosomethingreel.com for $5.99 through May, with a different film available on the site each month.

Additionally the film will be shown at select Whole Foods stores. A list of screenings, plus tips on conserving water, can be found at www.dosomethignreel.com and Whole Foods’ Facebook page.

Redford said the film also is available on DVD for free to community organizations or nonprofits that want to hold public screenings of the film. He said they also are in discussions related to a cable broadcast.

Watershed is Redford’s fourth social impact documentary, after The D Word: Understanding Dyslexia, Mann V. Ford and The Kindness of Strangers. Redford said he now is in production on two more such films.

“I feel blessed to do these kinds of films,” he said. “As for ‘Bob,’ I'm sure he'll continue to build on his extraordinary record.”

Proceeds will help fund the 2012 Whole Foods Market/AFI-Discovery Channel Silverdocs Festival filmmaker grants, and the festival is presented in association with Applegate Organic & Natural Meat, Earthbound Farm Organic, Popcorn Indiana and siggi’s.

Whole Foods Market also has partnered with online charity fundraising site Crowdrise to allow donations to the Colorado River Delta Water Trust, dedicated to restoring the Colorado River Delta, at www.crowdrise.com/watershed.

“If the 1% that inhabits the Colorado watershed were to write checks for $100, you could buy enough water rights to reconnect the river to the Gulf of California,” Redford said. “You could get the same amount of water if everyone in Denver reduced the square footage of their lawns by 50%. This is doable.”

A 'Vow' For Retail Savings

Movies based on books make for easy retail promotions, since the home video can be paired with the original source material for a nice gift set. For example, May 8 Target offered a $5 savings with the joint purchase of Sony Pictures’ The Vow on disc and the book upon which it’s based, which was priced at $11.99.

Otherwise, Target’s attentions were turned toward clearing inventory as part of a “Mother’s Day Gifts for All Budgets” promotion, touting DVDs at $5, $10, $15 and $25 price points.

In addition, Target is taking advantage of the buzz around The Avengers with a sale of several Avengers tie-in products, such as $12.99 DVDs of earlier films in the series, as well as action figures, T-shirts, branded soda and snacks and more.

Best Buy continued to push its Upgrade & Save program, which lets customers exchange a used DVD for a $5 coupon that can be used on any Blu-ray priced at $9.99 and above. The chain devoted a page of its weekly ad circular promoting catalog titles that, with the coupon, could be had for as low as $4.99, such as Apollo 13 and Casino.

Best Buy also highlighted some TV DVD titles with a section labeled as “Season Finales Are Coming,” encouraging shoppers to check out previous seasons of their favorite shows.