Showing posts with label 1973. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1973. Show all posts
29 August 2017
29 June 2017
5 April 2017
14 January 2017
4 December 2016
24 November 2016
10 October 2016
7 September 2016
12 August 2016
13 July 2016
29 February 2016
17 March 2015
Peter Bogdanovich's Paper Moon added to Eureka's Masters of Cinema line!
Eureka! Entertainment have announced the release of PAPER MOON, one of the biggest successes in the career of Peter Bogdanovich (The Last Picture Show, What’s Up, Doc?, Mask) starring Ryan O’Neal (Love Story, Barry Lyndon) and his daughter Tatum O’Neal, the youngest ever Academy Award recipient for her performance in the film. Shot with stunning monochromatic film, the release will include a slew of extras and a 36-page booklet. Available in a Dual Format edition as part of Eureka’s award winning The Masters of Cinema Series, from 18 May 2015.
PAPER MOON Trailer
Available to pre-order from:
Amazon http://amzn.to/1Cr416w
SYNOPSIS:
Continuing a run of Seventies smash-hits for director Peter Bogdanovich after the enormous success of his The Last Picture Show and What’s Up, Doc?, Paper Moon saw the filmmaker sustaining his collaboration with actorRyan O’Neal, and introduced the world to the precocious talent of the future Barry Lyndon star's daughter Tatum, then 10, who for her performance was the youngest-ever actress to be awarded an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.
After meeting a newly orphaned girl named Addie Loggins (Tatum O’Neal), con man Moses Pray (Ryan O’Neal), who may or may not be Addie’s father, is enlisted to deliver the newly orphaned Addie to her aunt in Missouri. Shortly after however, the two realise that together they make an efficient scam-artist duo. Adventure ensues as the pair blaze through the American Midwest, stealing, swindling, and selling the moon…
With its stunning black-and-white cinematography shot by the great László Kovács and its superb evocation of Depression-era locales, Paper Moon endures as one of the key American comedies of the 1970s. The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present the film in its UK home viewing premiere in a new Dual-Format edition.
• Glorious new 1080p transfer of the film
• Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard-of-hearing
• Full-length audio commentary with director Peter Bogdanovich
• A group of documentaries about the making of the film
• 36-PAGE BOOKLET featuring a new essay on the film by Mike Sutton, rare production stills, and more!
PRESS:
“Tatum O'Neal makes a sensational screen debut” - Variety
“A charming mixture of Hawksian comedy and Fordian lyricism” – Time Out
1 December 2014
A Marriage Made In Heaven, When You Buy Ganja & Hess On Dual Format This January
Eureka! Entertainment have announced the release of Ganja &Hess. Flirting with the conventions of blaxploitation and the horror cinema, Bill Gunn’s revolutionary independent film Ganja & Hess is a highly stylized and utterly original treatise on sex, religion, and African American identity. Later recut and released in an inferior version, this edition represents the original release, restored by The Museum of Modern Art with support from The Film Foundation, and mastered in HD from a 35mm negative. Ganja &Hess will be released in a Dual Format (Blu-ray & DVD) edition on 26 January 2015.
Check out this clip Eureka! have sent us...
Duane Jones (Night of the Living Dead) stars as anthropologist Hess Green, who is stabbed with an ancient ceremonial dagger by his unstable assistant (director Bill Gunn), endowing him with the
SPECIAL DUAL FORMAT (BLU-RAY + DVD) EDITION:
• Brand new 1080p high-definition transfer
• Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• Feature-length commentary with producer Chiz Schultz, lead actress Marlene Clark, cinematogropher James Hinton and composer Sam Waymon
• Select scene commentary with historian David Kalat
• The Blood of the Thing: film historian David Kalat leads an interview-based documentary about the film
• Gunn’s original screenplay available via DVD-Rom and BD-Rom
• Reversible Sleeve
• 24-page booklet featuring a new essay by critic and author Kim Newman and a vintage letter written by Gunn to the New York Times, illustrated with archival images
27 October 2014
25 April 2014
24 February 2014
Masters Of Cinema Blu-ray Review - Serpico (1973)
Genre:
Crime, Drama, Biography
Distributor:
Eureka! Entertainment
Rating: 18
BD Release Date:
24th February 2014 (UK)
Director:
Sidney Lumet
Cast:
Al Pacion, Jack Keghoe, John Randolph, Barbara Eda-Young
Buy: SERPICO (Masters of Cinema) (Blu-ray)
Serpico is one of the crowning achievements in two careers, which had plenty the director Sidney Lumet, and the film’s star Al Pacino. It came off the heels of Sidney Lumet’s little seen but brilliant Sean Connery cop film The Offence and Pacino’s star making role in The Godfather and his equally great performance in Scarecrow.
Al Pacino shines as the title character of Frank Serpico, who starts life out as a uniformed police officer. He gradually discovers a world of police corruption and plans to blow it open. Serpico becomes increasingly idiosyncratic such as read literature not associated with a police officer and basically becomes a hippie. His behaviour makes his partners, superiors to be suspicious of him cause he refuses to take any payoffs. They eventually start to threaten his life.
Sidney Lumet was the undisputedly the king of gritty New York realism and Serpico was the beginning of what would make his name despite working since the 1950s and making many great films by this time. It’s both a pioneering cop film and a brilliant examination of a man who is a flawed moral crusader. Serpico along with The French Connection became the blueprint for the gritty realistic cop film we now know and love today.
The film is also very much a product of the time. It’s a film made at the climax of the Vietnam War, Watergate and the death of the Hippie dream. Lumet was always a political director even though his politics never made his films inaccessible to people of the left or the right is evident in the right leaning Tea Party appropriation of the “I’m not gonna take it anymore” line from his later 70s masterpiece Network despite his liberal politics. It could also just be there were fewer films then and people of all political persuasions would see what was new.
Lumet would return to the topic of police corrupt in the New York police force in later films such as Prince of the City and Q & A but he never bettered Serpico on the subject. Pacino and Lumet really were at the top of the game; both star and actor rarely put a put a foot wrong in the 70s. The most amazing thing about the film is that Pacino and Lumet topped it with their next collaboration Dog Day Afternoon but that’s a different story altogether.
Ian Schultz
25 January 2014
DVD Review - Iluminacja (1973)
Genre:
Drama
Distributor:
Second Run
Rating:
15
DVD Release Date:
27th January 2014 (UK)
Director:
Krzysztof Zanussi
Cast:
Stanislaw Latallo, Malgorzata Pritulak, Monika Dzienisiewicz-Olbrychska
Buy: Illumination (Iluminacja) [DVD]
The film is about a young physicist Franciszek Retman(Played by Stanislaw Latallo) and it’s about his self-discovery though his time at University and beyond. It mixes both fiction filmmakers and documentary filmmaking and at times morphs into an essay film. It’s both a very good coming of age film about a man who starts off as idealistic wantabe physicist to a broken man who realizes there is more to life than just science. He experiences love, loss, betrayal and eventually has a existential crisis as you do.
The film was one of the most pleasant surprises from Second Run in a while. I have to admit a film about a physicist which was described as a essay film really didn’t appeal to me but it’s much more accessible than the plot synopsis suggests. The film should connect with anyone who has been a 20 something that questions their place in the universe. It’s worth checking out and it should raise some interesting questions about your place in the universe and the meaning of it.
Ian Schultz
15 December 2013
Blu-Ray Review - The Long Goodbye (1973)
Genre:
Crime, Thriller, Drama
Distributor:
Arrow Video
Rating:
18
BD Release Date:
16th December 2013 (UK)
Director:
Robert Altman
Cast:
Elliott Gould, Nina van Pallandt, Sterling Hayden
Buy The Long Goodbye: Blu-ray [Amazon]
One of the films Robert Altman followed up his revisionist western McCabe &Mrs. Miller with was perhaps his most savage genre revision of a career of many with The Long Goodbye. It was his return to Hollywood after he made his more European flavoured psychological thriller Images in Ireland.
One night Terry Lennox askes for a lift down to Tijuana on the US/Mexico border when he visits Marlowe. He obliges and drives him but the next morning he is met by cops when he wakes him informing him Terry Lennox has committed suicide and murdered his wife. It starts a chain of events involving Marlowe tracking done a writer after being hired by his wife and being involved with some local L.A gangsters. As usual when it comes to these tales there is more than meets the eye.
The film is extremely loosely based on Raymond Chandler’s novel of the same title. The source novel featured his most famous creation the Private investigator Philip Marlowe most famously played by Humphrey Bogart in Howard Hawks’ adaptation of The Big Sleep. The screenwriter Leigh Brackett was responsible for both adaptations but they couldn’t be more different and Robert Altman had a lot of input in the final script. Altman’s radical approach to the storytelling was crystalized in the fact he never actually read the entire book and actually was more inspired by Raymond Chandler Speaking, which was a collection of letters and essays.
Elliot Gould plays Philip Marlowe and the case could be made he gives the gives the finest portrayal of Marlowe even though in many ways different from the source character. His portrayal was a clear inspiration for The Dude in The Big Lebowski which itself is a radical homage to Chandler. Marlowe during the famous cat-feeding scene he comes off a bit stoned to say the least that draws parallels to The Dude. He pulls the mumbling wise cracking of Marlowe to a t without it ever seeming false. Gould’s portrayed left such an imprint on Chandler’s estate he was later hired many times to read Chandler’s work on tape.
The Long Goodbye is one of Altman’s more contained films than the more ensemble satirical dramas he is more known for like Nashville, Short Cuts and M*A*S*H. The 70s was clearly the decade the majority of his great work came out even though he had some phenomenal work in the early 90s.
It’s a radical reworking of a much-celebrated author; the British critics were particularly harsh on the film because it wasn’t the Bogart take on Marlowe. It’s one of the few films he made with a clearly defined lead character and it helps the film in many ways and the fact it’s Elliot Gould in his personal favourite performance doesn’t harm the proceedings.
The film was a financial flop on its initial release but has since became a critical and fan favourite. It’s one of the last great neo-noirs of the 1970s along with Chinatown and Night Moves. It was last decade till recently that because of the current Political climates these stories seemed timely and not out of date. Arrow Video has released one of their finest Blu-Rays with a wealth of material including an hour-long doc on Robert Altman, an hour-long conversation with Elliot Gould, old features from the region 1 dvd along with new interviews with specialists on Altman, Chandler and Hard-Boiled Fiction.
It’s ok with me.
Ian Schultz
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