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DigiGods Episode 257: 2023 Holiday Show and Gift Guide
72 Plays1 year ago
Gifts and recommendations galore, including 4Ks for every collector, spectacular Criterions and sensational steelbooks!
DigiGods Podcast, 12/05/23 (M4a) — 61.4 MB
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In this episode, the Gods discuss:
- 3 Film Holiday Collection: Christmas in Maple Hills / Christmas with the Knightlys / Christmas in Big Sky Country (DVD)
- ALF: The Complete Series (Deluxe Edution) (DVD)
- American Graffiti 50th Anniversary Edition (4k UHD Blu-ray)
- An Angelic Christmas (DVD)
- The Apostle / At Play in the Fields of the Lord (DVD)
- Bull: The Complete Series (DVD)
- Carry On - Film Collection 2 (Carry On Jack, Carry On Cabby, Carry On Cruising, Carry On Regardless) (Blu-ray)
- Cats Don't Dance (Blu-ray)
- Christmas In Evergreen - Bells Are Ringing (DVD)
- A Christmas Story Christmas (DVD)
- The Color Purple (4k UHD Blu-ray)
- Cosa Nostra: Franco Nero In Three Mafia Tales By Damiano Damiani (3-Disc Collector's Edition) (Blu-ray)
- Dance, Fools, Dance (Blu-ray)
- Days of Heaven (4k UHD Blu-ray)
- The Dead Mother (Blu-ray)
- Director Spotlight: Neil LaBute 4-Film Collection (Nurse Betty, Your friends & Neighbors, The Shape of Things, Possession) (DVD)
- Director Spotlight: State of Play / Black Sea (Blu-ray)
- Don't Look Now (4k UHD Blu-ray)
- Double Danger: Drop Squad / Waist Deep (Blu-ray)
- Double Trouble (Blu-ray)
- Drylongso (Blu-ray)
- The Eight Mountains (Blu-ray)
- EO (Janus Contemporaries) (Blu-ray)
- Epic Showdowns: 4 Action Movies (Kull the Conqueror, The Cowboy Way, The Jackal, End of Days) (Blu-ray)
- The Equalizer 3 (4k UHD Blu-ray)
- EVANGELION:3.0+1.11 THRICE UPON A TIME (4k UHD Blu-ray)
- The Expanse: The Complete Series (Blu-ray)
- Expend4bles (4k UHD Blu-ray)
- The Expendables, The Expendables 2, and The Expendables 3 (4k UHD Blu-ray)
- Familiar of Zero (Blu-ray)
- Farscape: The Complete Series (25th Anniversary Edition) (Blu-ray)
- Father's Little Dividend (Blu-ray)
- Freaks / The Unknown / The Mystic: Tod Browning's Sideshow Shockers (Blu-ray)
- The Fugitive (4k UHD Blu-ray)
- Gay Purr-ee (Blu-ray)
- Hallmark 3-Movie Collection: Christmas with Holly / Silver Bells / One Christmas Eve (DVD)
- Haul Out The Holly (Blu-ray)
- The Innocent (Janus Contemporaries) (Blu-ray)
- Irwin Allen: Master Of Disaster Collection (Blu-ray)
- Jackie Chan: Emergence of a Superstar (Half a Loaf of Kung Fu, Spiritual Kung Fu, Fearless Hyena, Fearless Hyena II, The Young Master) (Blu-ray)
- John Wick: Chapters 1-4 (Blu-ray/DVD)
- La Bamba (Blu-ray)
- La Céremonie (4k UHD Blu-ray)
- The Last Picture Show (4k UHD Blu-ray)
- Leave it to Beaver: The Complete Series (Blu-ray)
- The Life of Emile Zola (Blu-ray)
- Lifetime 12-Movie Set - A Very Merry Movie Collection Volume 6 (DVD)
- Little Women (Blu-ray)
- A Magical Christmas Village (Blu-ray)
- Mean Streets (4k UHD Blu-ray)
- A Moment of Romance (Blu-ray)
- Moonage Daydream (Blu-ray)
- Mrs. Brown's Boys: Holly Jolly Jingles (DVD)
- Music & Romance 6-pack: Shout / Captain Corelli's Mandolin / Connie and Carla / The Man Who Cried / Th
Recommended
Transcript
Susie Snowflake and Recording Preparations
00:00:06
Speaker
Whee! Look who's coming! Here comes Susie, snowflake dressed in a snow white gown Tap, tap, tapping at your window pane To tell you she's in town
00:00:23
Speaker
Here comes Susie's snowflakes. And as usual, we've talked before the show. When you open the device, the application here, you should just start recording. I should. Before I even get there, and then that way, all of that, that's what we
LAFCA Meeting Insights and Awards Contenders
00:00:44
Speaker
should do from now on.
00:00:44
Speaker
Yeah, we're, of course, you know, so on the 10th is when Tim and I are going to sit down with a, with like a room full of, I don't know, 40 or 50 other LAFCA members and get cranky and, you know, spend, I mean, we have to be done by 4.30 though, because we're renting the room. So, 9, 10, 11, 12, so 4, 5, that's seven hours. You think we can get it done in seven hours? What we have before, not often, but we have before, but not often.
00:01:12
Speaker
Oh my gosh. Anyway, now we've just been seeing a lot of the awards contenders. I'm trying to narrow my choice. Like, I mean, in fairness, I'm not going to name any names, but the emails that go back and forth, we've been making fun of this. The emails that go back and forth, you know, between LAFCA members. There are certain numbers, certain group
00:01:29
Speaker
that dominates them. Let's just say that there are maybe five, six, seven names out of about 70. And we may get 40 or 50 who show up to the meeting that really sort of dominate all the discussion. And I'm kind of, you know, paying very loose attention. But when somebody recommends a four and a half hour foreign film to me, because it's it's significant in the continuum, a previous 13 and a half hour movie,
00:01:54
Speaker
I have not seen the thirteen and a half hour movie, it's never gonna. And a half hour movie? No, no, no. Killers of the Flower Moon, that's where I draw the line. I've seen too many movies that are two and a half, three hours. Oppenheimer 3, I'm done. I don't have time for this. When I see something like, like Flora and Son, the John Carney film. Merciful, gracious, heavenly God, it's 97 minutes. Thank you.
00:02:16
Speaker
Yeah. And it's and it's 97 minutes. It's nice and tight. It's a John Carney film doing what he does in every one of those films once and and I think it's wonderful. I realized it to Bono's daughter. And I know I'm not supposed to say this, but somehow her she being Bono's daughter makes me love her even more. It's just great. It's just great. It's sassy. And yeah, so you
Upcoming Film Releases and Streaming Impact
00:02:42
Speaker
know,
00:02:42
Speaker
Yeah, we had this big conversation about all of these big movies, which I guess most of them are out now. Most of them are out and people are seeing them now. No, I guess Maestro, not till the 20th on Netflix, I guess. Is it in the real world? It's in theaters. And Chicken Run and Wonka don't come out until the 15th.
00:03:03
Speaker
We can see that we've seen those as well already. I'm a big fan of Chicken Run. I know a lot of others aren't, but I thought it was hilarious. I woke my family up laughing at it. The one that has been screening, but we don't have a screener for yet, is the wrestling one from Sean Durkin. Is it Iron Claw? Iron Claw. In origin, did you get anything for Ava Duvallay's?
00:03:30
Speaker
Origin is the Ava DuVernay film with Anjini and Ellison, the adaptation of that. I've got a link for that, but that's, you know what, I got to be honest, Array for whatever reason, maybe for budgets, because it's a small distributor, but they haven't really pushed a lot. Not a big marketing situation, just Anjini and Ellison, who they're, but yes, I would like to see that.
00:03:52
Speaker
You know, before before the show, we were we were having a biopic conversation. We're talking about films like Maestro and Rustin, which are competent biopics, you know, for made by and for Netflix. But but they like their, you know, my wife has a way of she says the Netflix films, they just they feel like TV movies.
00:04:09
Speaker
Even if they're big budget, even if they're very slick, they don't feel like they're made for a big audience in a theater. There's a thing. When you're making a movie and you know it's going to be on a 50-foot screen and you know there's going to be 500, 600, 800, maybe 1,000 people packed together watching it,
00:04:25
Speaker
You kind of build the emotions in, you build in the laugh lines, you build in the cheer moments, you know, you build in things that make people gasp, you build all that in. And if you have now a different mindset where you think, oh, I need to hook them in the first five minutes or else they're going to turn it off. Well, that's a streaming thing now.
00:04:45
Speaker
movie theater are gonna walk out in five minutes you don't need to hook them as quickly you can you can you can build more slowly with streaming you gotta get in you gotta give them something right at the top and you don't build in those big emotional moments because you're sitting alone at home with maybe you know two other people tops.
00:05:02
Speaker
So it's more about maintaining interest throughout. So the whole rhythm of the story, the focus of the story tends to be smaller and more even-handed and less cinematic. They just do. And I think that affects both those films. Absolutely. It's an interesting thing because it's two things. One harkens back to the old thing, back before television went 16 by 9. So before television went 16 by 9, it was 133. That little silver square box in there. And there was a style
00:05:31
Speaker
of directing that was developed for directing on television. And, you know, anybody who grew up watching television in that entire period knows that. And it was a thing that cinematographers, directors, filmmakers had to start to understand how to do, how they had to make television more visually cinematic as the shape of the frame change. So, you know, 2009, I guess is when that happened, sort of super duper efficiently, right? Something like that.
00:06:01
Speaker
And so that changed. But this is what didn't change. The shape of the box changed. But the nature of the storytelling for television didn't change. Television is an episodic medium. Television is an episodic medium. Even the TV movies that they used to make back in the day, the TV movies, they were shaped like episodes.
00:06:23
Speaker
and either your movies of the week and then you would watch them. Television is an episodic medium. I say television, I mean streaming, streaming, television, whatever you're watching it on. So television is a metaphor for all of the streaming. It's an episodic medium.
00:06:37
Speaker
And I do not sit down in front of that to give it two and a half hours sitting there. I'm going to give this 30 minutes, 45 minutes, whatever it is. And I needed to hit these certain beats at certain moments like a television episode always did. They always did. Mannix? Are you kidding me?
00:06:59
Speaker
after the talk about the Wild Wild West they literally would cut to the box and they would put the cartoon and freeze the frame of where all the characters were and what they were doing in this moment so that they could go to the commercial so that they would come back and there they are all still frozen and we go again.
Theatrical Experience vs. Streaming
00:07:14
Speaker
See, this is why I've appreciated that certain films have insisted that we see them projected. Like, you know, Color Purple really, really pushed it right up until the end before they made it possible for us to see it on the link, because they wanted to get people in with theater. Look, I sat there with Mark and his wife, watching it at the Academy, first public screening of Color Purple in that theater that seats 1,100 people.
00:07:39
Speaker
And dude, people cheered and they applauded. And the movie is beautifully shot up there and it's just, and then, you know, then Oprah and the cast come out and the director come out and they're up there and then it's over and they've got us. And we're like, I'm just, I'm loving this evening. I'm having a grand old time at the movies. If my first exposure to Color Purple had been at home on a link,
00:08:05
Speaker
where i'm not feeling a thousand people around me all cheering and applauding it did designated moments when the filmmakers want that movie and that i am missing a huge part of that experience so that's that's what i think award season you know that's those the pitfalls what are you loving right now is there anything that you're just nuts over.
Film Performances and Screenplay Praises
00:08:27
Speaker
I really thoroughly enjoyed some of the smaller films. I'm really thoroughly, I really thoroughly enjoyed past lives, really thoroughly enjoyed anatomy of a fall. It's a bit of a Perry Mason kind of thing, but that performance by a son of a ruler is actually very, very, very good. So I love that Aki Kurzmaki film, that finished film. Oh, Fallen Leaves or whatever it is.
00:08:56
Speaker
So I'm sort of roaming through all of these smaller films and feeling some performances and feeling some storylines that are sort of interesting because they represent people that I actually get. American fiction, I mean, my guy, it's at the top of my list, by the way, American fiction. Oh, good. Jefferson Court's film. For me, it's the films with the really strong script. It's American fiction and the Holdovers.
00:09:18
Speaker
And I think the Holdovers, man Alexander Payne came roaring back after that Matt Damon thing with little shrinky people. Down-sizing, down-sizing. Down-sizing, yeah, that bombed. Man, he came roaring back doing what he does. I think the Holdovers is amazing. I think American fiction is one of the most beautifully written screenplays.
00:09:41
Speaker
And I emailed you guys this too, you know, because they send us the screenplays too. Cord Jefferson is a wonderful writer. Very often you will see a film and you go, that's a great screenplay. And then you read the actual script and you go, it's actually not such a great, like the script became a good movie and they're good structural things, but as a piece of literature, as a piece of prose reading the script, very oftentimes it's just like, it's a little painful.
00:10:07
Speaker
Court Jefferson writes a beautiful screenplay, reading it, reading what he has written on the page, not just about the dialogue, it's his stage direction. It's the way that he makes it a pleasure to read on the page and that comes through in the film because I'm reading some of those scenes and I'm like, the scene reads beautifully.
00:10:32
Speaker
but what Jeffrey Wright does with it is even better. So he takes something that's already been beautifully composed and then just spins it into even greater gold. So that is a wonderful thing. The Holdover is beautifully shot. The music selection is eccentric and weird and wonderful. Paul Giamatti has never been good. He's never been good. Coming back to Alexander. Let me ask you this. Why is air? When air came out,
00:11:01
Speaker
Yeah, but it's just not, nobody's talking about air. On mine, that's getting all kinds of love from me. Yeah, me too. But I'm doing this thing, I do this thing with the LA Times, it's called the Buzz Media thing, you can see it like that. I love the fact that I know literally everyone, I open it to that page and I look at it and I go, oh look, there's Tim, and there's Claudia, and there's Ann, and you know, like I know all of you, and there's Glenn, and there's Justin, I know every single person on that page.
00:11:25
Speaker
I hate my picture of that thing. But air, no love there. And I just have to do with distance and time and whatever. But, you know, because with air, you get another really good screenplay. You really, you get a really good supporting performance from Ben. And you get this really good lead performance from Matt. You got a whole bunch of stuff to me in there. Incredible supporting performances. Even, even Chris Tucker.
00:11:51
Speaker
Chris Tucker. Oh, Chris Tucker is great in it too. And and even Jason Bateman. Jason Bateman is like barely in the thing. Who's the guy that plays his plays Michael's agent? I forget his name. He was in the Milly Kelling show for years ago. No, no, that's I'll see. You know what I'm talking about. But he's amazing. That's
Audience Affection and Awards
00:12:12
Speaker
not to forget Viola, who gives a Christmas scene.
00:12:17
Speaker
Thank you very much. I'm looking at air and I'm like, I see all kinds of nominations in this one movie. I was standing behind Chris Messina in line at the Killers of the Flower Moon premiere. Yeah. And I was texting Mark at the time. I was like, I'm behind Chris Messina. Do I tell him how much I loved him in air? Or do I just shut up and not be a geek? It was very funny. But we want him in the same line because our last names both begin with M.
00:12:48
Speaker
So there we go. A lot of these things I love. Excuse me. The burial.
00:12:55
Speaker
I like the burial too. I like the burial very much. I don't know if it's an awards film. That thing. I hang around over there with my boys and my people. It's almost too much fun. Well, because Jamie is so good at it. But this is the thing about Jamie Foxx and the burial. If you know, I happen to know the person that he's playing. He's still alive, doesn't he? I used to see those commercials.
00:13:20
Speaker
Who are those commercials? He nails that guy. He nails that guy. For that matter, Tommy Lee Jones is actually very good at that movie. So little movies like that. And let me just say this, dude, in the black community, they cloned Tyrone. It's the best movie of the year, period. And it kind of really is. And again, Jamie Foxx.
00:13:44
Speaker
So it'll be interesting. I always notice this this time of the year that, you know, these other movies, the one that past lives, this wonderful film. And I know that the Asian community really, really loves this. So I'm not like past lives, too. But I don't know that it is at the top of my list.
00:14:00
Speaker
There are very few films that are kind of filtering to the very, very top, to the cream of the crop. American Fiction, Holdovers, Air, Color Purple, I'm trying to think what else is really up there for me.
00:14:18
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's been a good year. It hasn't been a great year. The films are really great. Like, I mean, the ones that just fly, like Flora and Son, I love, but I don't know that it's going to get any love. But that's the kind of thing I mean. Flora and Son, I get it. These little bitty films with all this kind of stuff. And I don't know. Sometimes I feel like, well, if the love factor of a film, how much actual people love it.
00:14:41
Speaker
If that, how much do we, should we weigh that in? I know it's all not all about a popularity contest, not just about a popularity contest, but I do think something about how much actual people love a film, how much I actually love a film, how much I enjoyed it, how much it lingers with me.
00:14:58
Speaker
I think all of that should weigh more than we give it sometimes. I agree. I mean, I just love Florence, son. And if that all by itself don't make an award, where is he? I'm not sure what the hell does. And this is in the trailer too, but it's still one of the biggest laughs.
00:15:14
Speaker
in the movie when she comes into his room and he's looking at his iPad and she goes, what are you doing? And it's the Irish lilt too. The Irish accent just makes things funnier. The British accent makes things funnier. In Chicken Run, the fact that you have chickens with teeth speaking in a Yorkshire accent and saying loathe after every line. That's all right, loathe. I laugh because they could be taking out the trash. I don't care. I laugh. When she comes in, she goes, so what are you doing? And he goes, you don't want to know.
00:15:43
Speaker
He's sitting there staring at his iPad. That's a funny line. Funny. I wanted to be in an audience. I wanted to be around like 600 people laughing at the same time. Anyway, anyway, uh, yeah. So, I mean, it's, uh, you know, it all begins. I got, we gotta have our, our critics choice ballot in at the end of the week. So I have to see everything by then anyway.
00:16:01
Speaker
Well, yeah, that's different because, you know, we're not in the room, all the other voting, it's a thing that happens online and you could just sing it. And the CAA, CCA, it's different in this way. You don't have, you know, the other 75, 80, 100 members of the, I guess there's several hundred members of that coming at you, you know, with their ideas and their thoughts and their feelings and some notion
00:16:30
Speaker
that, you know, I don't know, whatever it is. You just give a ballot and you fill in your PX and you're done. Yeah. Yeah. I like that. Yeah. Yep. Indeed. Well, let's, let's start off. This is our holiday show and we've got so much cool stuff.
00:16:45
Speaker
But I want to start off with like the all the criterion and the radiance stuff. This is the these the elite box sets this season. Mostly from criterion and also from their their new ish line which is
00:17:03
Speaker
the Janus contemporaries because Janus, and just so everybody understands, so Janus films, quick little history. Back in the 1950s and 60s, Janus films was founded by a couple of New York attorneys as to distribute a lot of foreign language films, Ingmar Bergman and Akira Kurosawa and you name it, a lot of foreign stuff that was becoming hot around the world, didn't really have a way of reaching American theater. So Janus was formed and Janus distributed those films.
00:17:29
Speaker
Those two attorneys would go on to have sons. Their sons founded the Criterion Collection and still run it. So that's why Janice and the Criterion Collection are basically affiliated brands. It's, you know, fathers and sons. That's what goes on there. So anyway, Janice contemporaries, they still own the rights to all those movies. So, you know, Janice is still a theatrical distributor. So it works hand in hand with Criterion. So they've released the Janice contemporaries line. So
00:17:58
Speaker
So I'm going to start off with this really great Radiance box set from Radiance Films, radiancefilms.us. This is three films by Damiano Damiani. What a great name, right? Beautiful. And it's Cosinostra. And these are three films that are
00:18:21
Speaker
They're not the godfather. I don't want anybody to think that, but there's only 3,000 copies of this, and it includes the Day of the Owl. The case is closed. Forget it. And last one, how to kill a judge. And this is all just Franco Nero.
00:18:36
Speaker
baby. Franco Narrow just looking good and yeah these are mob movies but you know what they're Franco Narrow movies. You're watching this so that you can watch Franco just be Franco and and be just badass and cool and and they're really fun. Of course it's reminiscent of the artwork of the one sheets from the period on each one of these boxes just go
00:19:01
Speaker
It's good stuff. It's good stuff. And Frank O'Narrow, come on. I mean, you know, he and Vanessa Redgrave, it's the epic romance of all time. How do you not get behind that? And yet the one movie they made significantly together, Camelot, they have no chemistry and I've never understood that.
00:19:15
Speaker
One of the great all-time Criterion Collection releases that keeps coming back on Criterion Channel. We now finally have it as a 4K Director's Edition. Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven. I cannot get enough of this movie. I love this movie. And you know what? There was, again, I hate to just attack our colleagues in LAFCA, but there was an email that came out talking about that. A wonderful little independent film this year called All Roads. The Taste of Dirt or Taste of Salt or something like that.
00:19:43
Speaker
not the greatest title, but it makes sense when you watch the movie. And somebody said, oh, it's like a close to a Tarkovsky film. It is not. It is not. It is not a Tarkovsky film. It is a Malick film. I said, if Malick were a young black woman in the South,
00:20:05
Speaker
That film would be Tree of Life. That's basically her Tree of Life. Anyway, it's a little like Days of Heaven, too. It has that lyrical, just wonderful, kind of dream-like way of floating through a particularly rural autobiographical narrative. Anyway, Days of Heaven is superb and wonderful, and I love this film. Young Richard Gear, dude. I mean, that's ridiculous. And it's just really, really good. Sam Shepard, just Sam.
00:20:35
Speaker
It's so lovely. It takes place in the 1910s. The movie was made in 1978. It's a superb film. Richard Libertini, who used to live up the hill from you, I think, right? Didn't Richard just live up to you? Yeah, yeah. I mean, close friend. His son is one of my oldest friends. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:20:54
Speaker
It's a beautiful movie days of heaven absolutely fantastic 4k lots of great stuff from criteria on that one on and then from the chance contemporaries line is a movie that is in our awards mix godland. And i cover that on radio i don't know that i'm as in amort of godland as some are but i i i have an appreciation for it this is a rather long movie two and a half hour long movie about.
00:21:19
Speaker
It's one of those Nordic movies where everyone's suffering. It's almost like you just want to say to these people, why did you even move to that part of the planet if you're just going to sit there and be cold and suffer and starve all the time? That's why. So they can make movies about it. Yeah, that's why. No, this is about a Danish priest in the late 19th century who goes to Iceland to build a church and it doesn't go well.
00:21:49
Speaker
For me, there's way too much sort of extremely literal imagery in this film. He's wandering around, he has his stuff on his back, that chair with the tires that come out above his head that look like the pillars of a great cathedral as though he's literally carrying the church on his back. I'm like, really?
00:22:24
Speaker
I was going to say, the better film of that type for me is The Promised Land, which is also a Danish film, but that's the one with Mads Mikkelsen.
00:22:37
Speaker
Nicholas Arsal directed it and it was co-written by Anders Thomas Jensen, the great Danish screenwriter. I mean, that takes place in the 1755. And that is a killer of a movie. It's one of my favorite films of the year. I don't know if anybody else is going to vote for it, but man, he basically plays this old soldier, guy who became a captain, even though he was born a peasant.
00:23:03
Speaker
And the northern part of Denmark at that time is just all swampland. It's all just sandy dirt and swampland. You can't grow anything in it. But the king wants to reward some people who can grow in it. So he goes there to make his way. But he runs head on into this wealthy landowner who wants to drive him out. And I'm thinking, OK, it's a Western. It's basically unforgiven. The wealthy landowner wants to drive him out. The wealthy homesteader, the young homesteader is going to be driven out by the land baron.
00:23:29
Speaker
So it's a Western, it's a little bit unforgiven, but it's also a little bit Jean de Florette, right? Yeah, it is a biography. That guy existed. I love that movie, it was great, but you're right. I don't know if anybody's going to be talking about it so much. Also on 4K, Peter Bogdanovich's last picture show. Oh my gosh, this movie still holds up.
00:23:51
Speaker
The 4K, the 4K, I haven't seen the 4K. And sometimes I find that when black and white is brought to 4K, that it becomes crisp. Thank you. So you tell me. Nope. The criterion is very attentive to that. The grain is still there. The contrast is perfect. You do have to make sure that your TV is in cinema mode. I will say that because if you if you if it's switched over to that sports mode where
00:24:22
Speaker
It will kill the black and white. So make sure that your television is in the right mode, and then the black and white is just beautiful. But when it overdrives the picture, that's bad enough in color, but man, in black and white, you're looking at a negative. It becomes like silhouettes. It's not terrible.
00:24:43
Speaker
Another one from Janice contemporaries is the eight mountains. This is also in our awards mix. I'm not such a fan of this, to be honest. It doesn't have much by way of extras. It's, you know, got a little documentary feature at interviews. But this takes place in the Alps in Italy.
00:25:04
Speaker
And, you know, it's kind of an allegory about friendship and all of that. But it doesn't have the humor of what was the one that did what his name did with last year, where the guy cuts off his finger. You know, this doesn't have that. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. This takes place over 40 years, this friendship over 40 years. Yeah.
00:25:30
Speaker
Claude Chabral's La Ceremonie with Sandrine Bonaire and Isabel Yupaire from 1995 to, I mean, just a great late stage Chabral movie with two amazing actresses. Phenomenal, can't say enough about this. It's sort of the quintessential Chabral film. I love it. I've done a lot of commentaries for Chabral films with some of our colleagues, with Andy and some others. None of those are on here.
00:25:58
Speaker
So, you know, it's a it is it is now criterion though and it's a blu-ray not a 4k But it's absolutely terrific get it for Christmas get it for Hanukkah get it for whomever Moonage daydream. How did you feel about moonage daydream? That's out on 4k now, too. I don't know if I know Did I get that one? Oh, that was the the Bowie the Bowie doc. Oh, well, you know, yeah That was interesting the
00:26:22
Speaker
a couple of those films she came out. This one I thought was probably the most personal one. The one that seemed to be exploring him more than the music in and of itself. So I kind of liked it. What did you think? I'm lukewarm on it. But I mean, I don't know.
00:26:44
Speaker
I think I probably need a little bit more distance from Bowie personally. I know he's been gone for, you know, a number of years now. But I was thinking, well, a lot of people died that year. That was the year that we lost, you know, Prince, that year that we that we lost George Michael. Remember, that was the year that like everybody died. And I kind of don't feel like I'm yet ready to sort of revisit any of those. Well, this film
00:27:10
Speaker
almost the one that was sanctioned by the Bowie estate, whatever the hell that, I'm not really sure what that means. I don't know either. But whenever I hear it, it always makes me suspect. Yeah. Rather than just, you know, yeah, that someone lives in that space.
00:27:26
Speaker
We also have La Bamba, the Luis Valdez, speaking of biopics, the Richie Valens biopic with Lou Diamond Phillips. I love this movie. I enjoy it immensely. I think it dates pretty well. It's a little- 87, I think.
00:27:41
Speaker
87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87. 87.
00:28:08
Speaker
the filmmaker behind Freaks most famously. And this includes more than just Freaks. This includes Freaks, the Unknown and the Mystic. Browning is not that well known for some of the other films. So this gives you a better snapshot of his work overall. And the Mystic has been really hard to see for a very long time. So these have all been meticulously restored. This is all from, you know, the silent era into the early sound.
00:28:34
Speaker
Well, pre-code, I think. Well, pre-code. There's a reason he disappears once the code comes around because he just kind of shrugged and said, well, what do you want me to do with this? I can't work with these rules. No, but it's a really weird, eerie moment and a lot of great extras here that kind of give you shed some light on who Browning was, why he
00:28:59
Speaker
why he made the films that he made. It's it's there's a really interesting backstory to all of this anyway. A lot of the stuff in this in this box says to Yeah, they spent some time on some of the very interesting people that were working behind the scenes on a whole lot of these, these films. I mean, not just the stars, Joan Crawford, or whoever in the things, but but but the the production designers and, and, and all it's just because a lot of those people were so like notable, notable folks, you know? Yep.
00:29:26
Speaker
Got a couple more 4K's here. I'll mention in just one breath, Orson Welles, The Trial, based on the Franz Kafka novel, which is, you know, one of the, I mean, everyone loves this movie. Anthony Perkins is amazing in it. I've always felt like this was the inspiration for Steven Soderbergh's Kafka.
00:29:45
Speaker
Very much so. I think this is the film that he watched and he wanted to kind of do something that was very, very referential of it made in 1962. So heavily overshadowed by Lawrence of Arabia and all the other movies that came out in 62. But it's a really, really great movie. Amazing on 4K as long as the TV's not over driving. Same situation with the black and white. Same situation with the black and white. It's just spectacular.
00:30:08
Speaker
One of those films where Orson was sort of persona non grata at that period again in Hollywood and then he goes to where? Is it Poland? If you're someplace. I can't remember. And he scrapes together. If I'm not mistaken, a few of the bucks for this movie came from the Salkins.
00:30:25
Speaker
who would go on with the Superman movies and all that. They gave him a few bucks and he just went to some of those stark post-war and he would just shoot these long wide shots and he had these little rooms with Anthony Perkins. I really love that movie. It's really great.
00:30:41
Speaker
Well, and then as long as we're in the Kafka realm, there is something that's more than a little Kafka-esque, but there's other 4K from Criterion. Don't Look Now, the very controversial Nicholas Rogue film from 1973 with Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie based on the Daphne du Maurier story. It is eerie. It is creepy. It is
00:31:04
Speaker
It's just, it's, it's, I mean, it really, it doesn't, it's not the, you know, it's about a British couple in Venice, but it's, you know, it doesn't, it's not the Venice of your dreams. It's the Venice of your nightmares. It is a very Kafkaesque way of telling Du Maurier a tale, a little bit of Hitchcockian, I guess, and, and sexual in ways that even in 1973 were considered, whoa. Fairly explicit. Fairly explicit. I don't know about that.
00:31:33
Speaker
Anyway there's a great two thousand two documentary on here looking back on the film and the director and you know that it.
00:31:42
Speaker
I mean, Nicholas Rogue, for those who don't know, you know, his movies are an acquired taste. Rogue started as a cinematographer. He was actually one of the camera operators in Lawrence of Arabia. If you look in the credits, you'll be like, oh, look, there's Nicholas Rogue. And then Lean elevated him to cinematographer for Dr. Zhivago. And I think they may have worked together for like 16 seconds when Lean said, I don't think our visions are really going to mesh on this.
00:32:05
Speaker
And so they agreed to go their separate ways and Rogue then went on to shoot Mask of the Red Death or Corman. Yeah. And then pretty soon he was making weird stuff like this. Yeah, we asked the Amanda Feller with all that kind of stuff. Yeah. There's some interesting stuff in there. A lot of interesting stuff.
00:32:20
Speaker
So it's one of Rogue's more commercial films but still pretty intense and weird. I want to mention a couple of interesting foreign films here. The first one is Dry Long So.
00:32:36
Speaker
Which is a not not a foreign film but but a an intense indie film from the nineteen nineties that i was not aware of at the time yeah made by calling smith and takes place in oakland it is is maybe the most oakland
00:32:55
Speaker
film you have ever seen. Basically about you know, just black life in Oakland in the 1990s, which is a really intense moment. This movie is made for a buck 50. Yeah, very, very, very interesting film. I didn't even did you catch this when it came out? Yeah, back in 98.
00:33:11
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was one of the independent, it was an Indie Spirit Award famous. There you go. There you go. Faith back then, I was running out of there. It was just really neat, really neat little movie. Celine McKeel is in this film. Celine McKeel will go on to do all kinds of interesting things as a producer and all kinds of stuff. So yeah, it was a really, really neat movie. It's a young black photographer girl. But it's a nice genre.
00:33:34
Speaker
Oh, yeah. It's a little bit of a mystery. It's a little bit of a comedy. It's kind of it's sort of it's just it's like it's like a snapshot of life in a way that defies genre. And it's very interesting. Nickyatu Jusu. I'm sure I'm totally destroying the name. Nickyatu Jusu made Nanny in 2022. And this is a Senegalese film
00:34:01
Speaker
that is set in New York City. So basically the story of a Senegalese immigrant working for a family in New York City. And you think that this is a Sundance film, by the way, you think that this is basically going to be
00:34:20
Speaker
kind of one of those movies about cultural and ethnic dislocation. But it winds up being something very different. It's not a fish out of water movie in any comedic or even dramatic sense. It's much more almost a coming of age film. A coming of age film that takes place in a hostile or even a strange environment.
00:34:39
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. So I mean, it's a horror movie, for one thing. I mean, you know, it's an actual horror movie, but the horror is like, it's both real, and both about that, these people in this environment. It is it's called nanny. And it is it got the criterion treatment for even though it was made in 2022. So it's a recent film. And the filmmaker is Nickyatu Jusu, but it is a
00:35:04
Speaker
It's it is a it is a really fascinating film. I mean, it's again, this is like a genre splice because it's it is it is about the ordeal of being in a coming of age in a dislocated environment. And I think the horror is very much an allegorical commentary about that process anyway.
00:35:30
Speaker
She plays Corey in Titans. In case people want to make a connection because she's fantastic. She's so beautiful. It's insane how beautiful she is. And I think Michelle Monahan has walked around this film too. But Anna, she's Corey in Titans.
00:35:46
Speaker
Got another 4K Nicholas Rogue film. This one is much more accessible and more famous, actually, and that is The Great Walkabout, which I just absolutely adore. Just a beautiful score, beautiful music at the same time. John Barry. It's really just a fantastic film. Super simple film.
00:36:05
Speaker
So, this is a film about an Aboriginal boy and a young Australian woman who meet, and basically it is that kind of people coming from opposite sides of culture, opposite sides of life experience, and sharing a moment. And the walkabout is a thing that tribal Aboriginals do, it's their coming of age thing. It's like, consider it like a lot harder than a bar mitzvah.
00:36:35
Speaker
like a lot harder. But, you know, you sort of have to go out and survive and prove that you can, you know, live on your own and all this kind of stuff. And it's an ancient thing. And it's, you know, what this what this kid is doing. It's his passage to manhood. And I just think the world of this film, I it is deeply, deeply moving. I think a lot of that is because men of our generation had a thing for Ginny Agedder.
00:36:59
Speaker
It was that for sure. And you could put him, put Jenny Agener in anything and we were going to love it. So, but she is, she is luminous here. And David Gopalal, you know, this was one of his first performances as the young man, which is absolutely fantastic. I mean, it really is. It's a magical movie. It's a magical movie.
00:37:25
Speaker
Even back in 1971, this movie was noted for the fact that it respected the knowledge of the Aboriginal people. This little Aboriginal boy is capable of not only doing this thing that all Aboriginal boys were going to do, he keeps these two kids alive.
00:37:48
Speaker
And he is the thing there. So it was a film that on that scale looked at this culture and said, this culture knows things that we don't know. And that's a thing that was going on in this movie that I really appreciated. Both at the time, I kind of think that it continues to do that in a certain sort of way.
00:38:05
Speaker
I'm gonna give us four more 4Ks here from Criterion, one of which the Princess Bride has absolutely beautiful special packaging, like looks like a little book and it's just it's beautiful. Really nice. But here's what we got on 4K. We got the Princess Bride, we got Alejandro Amenabar's The Others with Nicole Kidman, Martin Scorsese's Immortal Mean Streets and Cronenberg's Videodrome. We all know these movies, they are loaded with extras, they all look great, but
00:38:33
Speaker
Tim, you know, that's an interesting collection of movies. The Princess Bride from Rob Reiner, who's now going to do a sequel to Spinal Tap, which is weird. The others, Roy Alejandro Menabar, who has disappeared despite being hugely successful, his career just evaporated.
00:38:48
Speaker
So all the others was 2001? That's the one in 2020, yeah. I mean, you know, where did he go? And Mean Streets, of course, you know, from the man who just gave us the turgid three and a half hour, uh, it was the Flower Moon. And Cronenberg's video drum. He's become an old man telling people to get off his lawn. What do we make of these four movies and their filmmakers now at this point in their, uh, in, in cinema history and their careers?
00:39:10
Speaker
Well, let's see. Well, you just mentioned that Rob Ryan is going to do that. That that what sequel, you know, which is just a terrible idea. So I think that speaks to that. You know, why would you sully that perfect thing? You did not only was that with it? Will I not make a sequel to that? I would not allow anybody else to do it either.
00:39:31
Speaker
As you just said, the others, I'm in a bar, I don't know. Good point, just kind of, boom, gone, what a way. I mean, open your eyes. He did that thing with, oh, the sea inside, the sea inside. Yeah, I don't know. Well, it's good for the sea inside.
00:39:55
Speaker
He's, you know, he's a major filmmaker. I just don't know what happened there. But even this the inside? It's 20 years ago. That's 2004. So, you know, I don't know. A 1983 video drama, I got to tell you, this was genius filmmaking. It was like hands-on, all practical effects filmmaking from Cronenberg, the Debbie area in Jameswood, way back in 1983. All practical effects.
00:40:21
Speaker
And, you know, and Cronenberg and his career and here we are now. So his kids, his kid kind of picked up where he left off.
00:40:30
Speaker
Also, real quickly, a couple of great foreign language films from Radiance. One is A Moment of Romance by Benny Chan, the fantastic Benny Chan, and The Dead Mother by Juana Bajo Ulua. Obviously, one is in Cantonese, one is in Spanish. I'll let you figure out which one, loaded with extras on here. Yeah, you know, it's...
00:40:51
Speaker
Oh, Andy Lau didn't. Moments from romance. Moments from romance is just really, it's a great Hong Kong crime classic. And it's just really, really solid. It's just right in the pocket of that genre. Andy Lau has not aged in the last 75 years. I don't know what his secret is. I really don't. And then the Dead Mother is just this really, really kind of dark, darkly humorous
00:41:20
Speaker
thriller with all kinds of really creepy, creepy edges in it, as you would expect from a movie called The Dark Mother. It is really kind of disturbing in the way that it, you know, I don't know anyone who's ever suffered a home invasion robbery or a break in or anything like that, but
00:41:42
Speaker
This makes the whole, it takes that concept and it just escalates it to borderline horror. It is quite a ride, but it is a dark and creepy ride. From the Janus contemporaries line,
00:42:01
Speaker
We have the amazing French film, The Innocent, which was just hugely, hugely successful in France. Tons of awards, tons of recognition. It's directed by Louise Garell. It's very French, though. It didn't do particularly well.
00:42:19
Speaker
here. And I think largely that's because it has a very dark, humorous streak in it that you almost have to speak French to understand it doesn't communicate in the subtitles. And it is deeply, deeply cultural. But boy, it all of the stuff about what you know, men do to win the love of women and please their mothers. It just it's a it's a pretty crazy. It's a pretty crazy ride. And it is if you especially if you speak French, it is just a blast and a great script.
00:42:49
Speaker
Emma Stone shows up in that, if I'm not mistaken. Yes, she does. Yes, she does. And then we also have EO, which won a bunch of awards from us last year. I still don't get it, dude. It's a donkey movie. Oh, Benji with a donkey. It is. It's Benji with a donkey. I don't get it. Why did our group go nuts for this? They found these sort of deep meanings there that are there, but they were there in all those Benji movies, too. I mean, the Benji movies. Whatever.
00:43:17
Speaker
Well, anyway, L.A. film critics went nuts for this movie by Jersey Scholemowski last year. It's basically, it's the Bresson, it's based on the Bresson film about the donkey and it's kind of a riff on that and I guess, I don't know, I don't get it.
00:43:38
Speaker
No bears the Jafar panahi movie a lot of people have been loving that this year, but then it suddenly disappeared in our conversation So I'm not sure how many people actually saw it but you know Jafar panahi just keeps making movies even though he's not supposed to and This was a pretty great one. So we should we should support it if we can by any possible means it's also a visit you can watch either of those films EO and no bears on the Criterion Channel
00:44:05
Speaker
And then the Dardan brothers made another lovely movie, but that's kind of par for the course with them. Some of them work better for me than others. Tori and Locita, I thought was on the better end of what they've been doing lately, and it is mercifully short. It's 89 minutes. That thing is just in and out. Did you see Tori and Locita?
00:44:23
Speaker
I talked about that on the radio show. It's a very powerful film about these young black girls and the young black boy and African immigrants and what they're going through. Ostensibly brother and sister, but the story becomes more complicated than that. Quite dire, beautifully acted, very powerful. A lot of really interesting movies. We've talked about this too, like the French film about the chef.
00:44:50
Speaker
These interesting movies about the experiences of specifically Northwest African immigrants in Francophone countries, where they used to have colonial connections. It's a very, very specific school of drama now, but it's emerging in Belgium and in France, and they're kind of wrestling with a lot of this because these populations are coming more and more there. The economies are
00:45:16
Speaker
increasingly at parity. You're not getting just refugees and economic refugees. You're getting people with skills who are, you know, moving into all kinds of skilled opportunities and jobs in those economies where they are needed. And it's creating a really interesting dynamic. It's not, I wouldn't say it's creating stresses, but it's changing the culture and it's changing it in ways that I think are really interesting. So, I like Torian Loquita very, very much.
00:45:43
Speaker
And then the last one of these this batch is Jackie Chan, Emergence of a Superstar. I, of course, a million years ago wrote a Jackie Chan coffee table book. I've spent a lot of time interviewing Jackie and on the set of Rush Hour 2, I guess it was at the time. I saw Brett Ratner direct or write a direct, whatever the call is directing.
00:46:07
Speaker
Anyway, yeah, this is a bunch of early stuff. These are movies that come from that early period before the Hong Kong New Wave really takes off, before he really kind of between the original Drunken Master and Police Story. And this is Half a Loaf of Kung Fu, Spiritual Kung Fu, The Fearless Hyena 1 and 2, The Young Master,
00:46:33
Speaker
Which was sort of when Jackie showed his chops as a director for the first time like there are some incredible set pieces in the young master. And then my lucky stars which is one of the one of the first of his really fun comedy kung fu films. Oh my gosh it's all so many I mean the extras here is just absolutely terrific. Frank Jang from who wrote Enter the Clones of Bruce shows up in here for an interview.
00:46:57
Speaker
So does Grady Hendrix, who wrote These Fists Break Bricks, which we've covered on this podcast. And a lot of other stuff, just interviews and featurettes and really, really great stuff. So they include the original language tracks as well as the English dub tracks.
00:47:21
Speaker
So these are all late seventies to kind of mid eighties. Great collection of movies. Great box set. Gotta get it. Jackie is not where he used to be, but you know, it's good stuff. Shall we get into the box TV sets? Groovy. Yeah. Like the movie boxes. The movie boxes too. Which one do we do? Let's jump to movie boxes because that's something cheaper collection is at the top of that list. As long as we're on that subject. Yeah.
00:47:51
Speaker
I'd love to see what's in that Sunny Cheeba box. Yeah, Sunny Cheeba, let me pull Sunny out over here. All right. Yeah, Sunny is... Is this the one out of Shouse Factory to the volume two?
00:48:06
Speaker
Yes, it is indeed. Yep. Sonichiba, volume two, another legend of the genre along with Jackie. This includes the defensive power of Aikido, 13 steps of Maki, karate warriors, the great Okinawa Yakuza war. I mean, come on, how do you not want to see a movie about the Yakuza war in Okinawa? Especially it's the great one as opposed to the not so great one.
00:48:30
Speaker
Karate for Life, Group 13, Assignment Kowloon. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. And the Okinawa War of 10 years. So apparently, you know, there were two wars. One was a Yakuza war and the other one lasted 10 years. No, I have not seen all of these. But I've seen a couple of them, like Karate Warriors is an awful lot of fun. That's from 1976. And the defensive power of Ikeda from the year before is really great.
00:48:57
Speaker
You don't really learn anything about Aikido. You don't really learn about its power, much less its defensive power. It's a great title, but it's still a fun film. It's still a really fun film. And this is a great box. It's from Shout Select, volume 149.
00:49:11
Speaker
Yeah, it's terrific. The carry on collection was at volume two. Yes, so there are the carry on films is a million of them. And we talked about the documentary on Jeremy Thomas last week and Jeremy Thomas's uncle directed all these movies just by nose.
00:49:30
Speaker
So there are there's a million of these movies. This is the second volume just making a mention. There are three of these volumes. This is from via vision in Australia. It's the best place that you're going to get is the only place you're going to get it from on Blu-ray. So it's worth looking it up as an import and getting these things because the carry on films are just a riot. Get all three volumes. We've got volume two here, which includes carry on caddy, carry on cruising, carry on regardless and carry on Jack, which is one of my favorites. I love carry on Jack.
00:50:00
Speaker
Look, here's the deal.
00:50:04
Speaker
The plots here really don't matter. These are just, this is just great, kind of swanky working class British comedy. And they were, it was an opportunity for a lot of really good screenwriters and some wonderful actors to just be funny, not sophisticated comedy. This is just good old fashioned. This is like a half a notch above Benny Hill.
00:50:31
Speaker
Yeah, and and these movies are absolutely wonderful and you see so many fantastic actors here and you think how do I why is that why that person never make other movies because they were making carry on movies. That's why becoming a part of the national whatever it's just, you know, in the UK, this would be I don't even know what, as compared to police academy, police academy, something like that. Yeah, be like the police academy movies, basically.
00:50:57
Speaker
Yeah, except, you know, more sophisticated and you don't have, you know, Michael Winslow going. I know we got the John Wick chapters one through four. The Shaw Brothers stuff. If you got that handy.
00:51:13
Speaker
We're in the genre, we're in the zone. This is the Shaw Brothers Classics, volume three. There are two different Shaw Brothers box sets that are coming out regularly, one from Arrow, which is kind of the elite one. And then this one, these are, but there are a lot of great titles here too. I mean, you know, this is one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11 movies, 11 movies on Blu-ray here. The Shaw Brothers stuff has been getting a really, I mean, beautifully restored, really just pristine, so colorful.
00:51:43
Speaker
Um, these movies are so well shot. And for so many decades, they were seen in crappy condition here, like bad prints, and they were scraped up, and they'd already toured 50 different countries, and then screened 10,000 times, and they show up, you know, on Channel 9 afternoon Kung Fu theater. That will be sadly made. No, the print just got beat up.
00:52:02
Speaker
Yeah, great, great stuff here. So the Shaolin Avengers is, I think, maybe the best of all of these. That's from 1976. We've also got Clan of the White Lotus from 1980, which is a kind of a late stage Shaw Brothers movie because Shaw Brothers gets sort of golden harvest kind of takes over once you get into the 80s.
00:52:27
Speaker
Shaolin Abbott, minus Shaolin Costello, oddly enough. Now it's a bad joke. That's from 1979. And then one of my favorites, one of the great kind of feminist Hong Kong titles of the period, The Vengeful Beauty.
00:52:45
Speaker
She is beautiful and man is she vengeful. So there's some great stuff here, but it's just, you know, it's basically to just load these films up. If you happen to have a 10 year old like I do and you try to do it when your spouse isn't looking and say, look, these are fun movies. Let's watch this.
00:53:18
Speaker
This is not yet. No, these are the bad ones. Shout, but it's good bad. This is also from Shout and they decided to just make a cheesy box and it's wonderful. It includes the movie, this is all from the 1970s and early 80s. So here we are in chronological order and people are gonna be like, really? Erwin Allen made those, he did. After he got that Oscar nomination for the Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure, he lost his mind and made a bunch of really crappy movies very quickly, which included
00:53:21
Speaker
I love it.
00:53:47
Speaker
Flood, that's 1976. Fire, 1977. We're just going with one name titles now. Hanging by a thread in 1979, which is over three hours long. It's just dreadful. And then we went back to the well in 1979 as well for beyond the Poseidon adventure. I don't know how you go beyond something that sinks, but there it is. When time ran out from 1980, the night the bridge fell down, kind of lowering our expectations now.
00:54:18
Speaker
And then in 1983, my favorite, K-Vin. With an exclamation point. Exclamation point. I mean, you know, it's all fun stuff. And you get, you get, you know, like great 70s actors all showing up. They look fine. Sally Field, Paul Newman, you know, what are you holding? They all show up in here. Yeah, some of them were kind of at the back end of their, you know,
00:54:42
Speaker
Their careers there, but there they were. Making TV movies, baby. Yeah. And then, yeah, we got the Fort John Wick films, not on 4K. They're all out on 4K, but they haven't given us a 4K box set. They have given us a lovely Blu-ray box set. DVD and Blu-ray, John Wick, chapters one through four. Perfectly serviceable for most people. So, yeah. And to be honest, priced incredibly affordably. Very much so.
00:55:12
Speaker
So if you look around, you can get all four of those. And I think that that's really smart. Really smart. Be a Santa. Be a Santa. Let's see. Should we go on to the 4K movies or TV? Let's throw down some TV gun. What do you want to do? The TV boxes? Let's do the TV boxes.
00:55:31
Speaker
I liked the expanse, and you didn't. So if you got that candy, we can talk about what we're getting in that expanse set there. The series.
00:55:45
Speaker
Which, you know, to me, it had a sort of interesting sort of overall conception series. Canadian series. Which is a point out of sci-fi network over there is where I first saw it. And it kind of tanked after that season and then Jeff Bezos said, well, I like the show. So he went and did it to continue and it ended up on Amazon. I, you know, here's, I mean,
00:56:08
Speaker
The problem that I have with most of these kinds of shows, the post Star Trek era shows, is that I don't quite ever buy into the world. So the whole premise of The Expanse is that, you know, we're a couple centuries into the future, right? And we've populated the Martian colonies, but they're kind of like, now it's a caste system.
00:56:31
Speaker
all the miners and the poor people and the outliers, they're part of Mars. And there's a war between Mars and Earth and then the people in the asteroid belt. So you've kind of taken what would
00:56:47
Speaker
It feels as though we're basically talking about a skirmish between Canada, the US and Mexico, but we've elevated it into a solar system level.
00:57:03
Speaker
As you said, sci-fi network, 2015 to about 2018. And that story had this whole thing going on with Thomas Jane, who was like, sort of real, but sort of not, and a private detective, and this whole very mystical, magical sort of thing going on. And by the time we get to it moving over to Amazon Prime in 2019-ish or so, or something like that, that's when we get to that storyline that you just,
00:57:29
Speaker
It becomes almost purely a politics storyline. As you said, a solar system-wide politics that was meant to reflect the politics of the world, blah, blah, blah, that sort of thing. So it was an interesting sort of switch there, 62 episodes altogether. So I don't know.
00:57:51
Speaker
Well, the complete series. Never mind me, because most people really love this show. Seriously, I'm like the outlier. So I'm like the asteroid belt belt or you're a belter. So ignore me. What do I know? We also have as long as we're talking about the the wonderful Aardman animation of Chicken Run.
00:58:12
Speaker
Shaun the sheep, the complete series is finally out. And this has taken long enough man, they have different people have put out like seasons of this and anyway, forget it. It's out now finally, the complete series and it is a nice little tight box set. So you can watch all of the Shaun the sheep stuff, the witch is just still so darn funny.
00:58:32
Speaker
This is a spinoff, of course, from Wallace and Gromit. And we had a couple of Shaun the Sheep movies as well, but the series is so, so funny. Because it's, Tim, your phrase, bit funny. That's what this is. It's just bits.
00:58:49
Speaker
It only needs to be funny in little like 30 second chunks. And it is. It's really wonderful stuff. So, you know, my daughter loves this. Very happy to finally have this at our disposal. Sean the sheep. Gonna get a lot of laughter. The new Nancy Drew. How do you feel about that? Did you watch any of that?
00:59:08
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, you know up till up till up till the recent season where does I think might have closed it out? So This Nancy Drew a series with mystical and magical there's all kinds of ghosts and witches and demons and and all these things never associated with the Nancy Drew and hardy boy stuff the hardy boys series also had that going on and there was a hardy boys. Yeah series recently to here and That kind of threw me to be honest with you
00:59:37
Speaker
That kind of, which is not just in that, you know, it's in your crime. It's not made for us. It's made for a generation that is genre attuned. They want genre in everything, including their Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys. Pamela Sue Martin is my Nancy Drew forever. But other than the supernatural stuff, I actually thought that the spirit of the character, if not the spirit of the stories, was well represented in this series.
01:00:04
Speaker
So that's out there too, four seasons of Nancy Drew on DVD from CBS and Paramount. We also have the Beave. Yeah, yeah. The series on Blu-ray, finally from Universal, the complete Leave it to Beaver. And my wife absolutely hates this. That's funny. I've gone back and forth on this. I'm feeling kind of nostalgic about it these days. Ran from 57 to 63, something like that. Yeah.
01:00:31
Speaker
So we get to watch Tony and Jerry, Tony down Jerry Mathers, Wally and the Beaver. We get to watch some kind of grow up a little bit. And when I look at that show now, I can see that maturity happen, particularly in Jerry Mathers to Beaver. And I'm like, this is really well done. This is very sophisticated. And some of those conversations that they had with Ward,
01:00:58
Speaker
Dude, I'm sorry. You can take those and break them out and you have some sort of situation with your kid. You say, hey, you know what? Let's let Hugh Moman explain this.
01:01:09
Speaker
Dead on dude, dead on stuff, raising those kids. Over the course of six years, six really crucial years, this show defined a very particular middle class coming of age trajectory in America in the 1950s. But what's interesting is, you're talking about nostalgia. Now, white people living in the suburb is not your nostalgia.
01:01:38
Speaker
There is something universal about this for boomers and you are a boomer. I am just on the cusp of I'm the first year of Gen X. My wife, quite a bit younger, very much a Gen X.
01:01:57
Speaker
And there is a generational shift there because by the time you get around to the Gen X moment, they're growing up with all of the single parent shows, right? They're growing up- Dil Dixie over there. Yeah, he's father.
01:02:14
Speaker
Even my three sons. My three sons, Brady Bunch, Ghost and Mrs. Muir, you know, the family affair, I mean, on and on and on and on, the Partridge family, right? It's like suddenly divorce and broken families is more the norm than for Leave It to Beaver and Courtship of Eddies or Donna Reed Show.
01:02:39
Speaker
and Ozzy and Harriet and right that like the 50s thing blew up in the 60s and more so in the 70s. So it's a very interesting cultural shift there, but I will say that Leave It to Beaver is an amazing snapshot of a particular kind of television and a cultural moment. And over this course of six years, it really, it does not repeat itself. You're right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Beautiful parenting. I'm sorry, just beautiful parenting in that show. I loved it.
01:03:07
Speaker
on the other hand, Paul, what's his name? Fusco, Fusco, Tom Patchett and their show. I remember when this show was announced.
01:03:22
Speaker
And you know the TV guy used to come out with the fall preview before there were 750,000 channels when it was just three networks and you know it was manageable and you could put a little one page summary of all the new shows in the one little TV guy and I would buy it every year and I'd read them and I'd memorize them and I'd figure out what shows am I gonna watch and darn it those two shows are up against each other on Tuesday night. How am I gonna deal with that? Because if only we had something that could record one show.
01:03:48
Speaker
that maybe some point in a space age future that miraculous technology will come around. But now I have to just choose one and maybe watch the other one and reruns during the summer. And Alf comes around and I remember reading that and go, well, that'll get canceled mid season. Son of a gun. It didn't. It ran for.
01:04:05
Speaker
Four seasons and I didn't spawn an animated series. How did that happen? Tim, explain reality to me. You tell me, man, 86 and I don't know. It's not like it's not like we hadn't had these, you know, alien creature or weird creature in the family.
01:04:22
Speaker
family sort of things before. This is 86 to 90. I do not remember whether or not this precedes Harry and the Hendersons or not. Harry was, they had like Bigfoot living with the family. And I suppose, you know, I mean, technically speaking, my favorite Martian had a Martian living with the dude. So, you know, we had, but this show here with this obnoxious elf alien life form, elf, that was, uh, uh, who wants all these academies.
01:04:50
Speaker
I don't know, dude, I just, I really, really deeply hated this show.
01:04:56
Speaker
It's like it's actually hated. It's the worst, but it's so beloved. The series deluxe edition. I know this is like we're recommending gifts, but, and you know, a lot of people are going to love this. I hate it so much. It's just so terrible. The jokes are so terrible. The puppetry is so terrible. I just don't understand it, but it just, Americans disappoint me.
01:05:23
Speaker
Yeah, so well, Alf doesn't warrant any further discussion. The people, no, really seriously, the people who love Alf are gonna be cursing our names and threatening us on social media and we won't care.
01:05:39
Speaker
I'm a Farscape guy. I like Farscape. Give us the pitch for Farscape because I've never been heavily into it, but I've never watched a ton of it. This is the 25th anniversary collection on Blu-ray. Four seasons and a whole bunch of bonus features that are just through the roof.
01:05:58
Speaker
I'm trying to publish your Jim Henson Company stuff. It really needs a lot of story. This guy, Ben Browder, who would go on to be a part of the Stargate Universe 2, the lead in this show with Claudia Black, the extraordinary Claudia Black.
01:06:14
Speaker
this fun series that combined all of these things, this Jim Hinton sort of puppetry sort of stuff on the spaceship in these sort of wicket sets with a neat storyline. Moya is this sort of large sort of biomechanical ship that's flying around and Ben Browder's character is this astronaut who gets through this wormhole into this other part of the galaxy where all of this wacky stuff is.
01:06:35
Speaker
And it's just a fun series that I always kind of dug. Well, I'll tell you, it has a great following. And I found that out because I, you know, this is 1999 to 2004, which was right around the time that there was where Richard Hatch was still alive. There was a big Balsar Galactica convention in Universal City. And I went and I covered it and I interviewed Richard Hatch at his apartment and the whole thing. And when I went to the convention itself,
01:07:02
Speaker
Which was, you know, Nerdsville Central. I mean, it was very funny, but there was a ton of Farscape stuff. And it's like you go to a Battlestar Galactica convention and Farscape breaks out. That was weird. But then I realized it's kind of the same fan base. Yeah, yeah. It sort of scratches the same itch in many respects.
01:07:21
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. It's that sort of series that I dug a lot. Ben Browner, man. He's one of those guys. Him, Richard Dean Anderson. There are a few of them. Scott Bakula, who have spent
01:07:39
Speaker
The better part of 40 years, always on television. Always. They never become Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt. But these guys have the better part of 40 years always on television. And I have to say, before I forget, the one great story I have from that Ballastar Galactica convention, Galacticon, or whatever it was called, was Patrick McNee.
01:08:09
Speaker
Of the avengers who played some people forget he played count eebly basically the devil on an episode or two part episode of her baby man when three parts of a bow star galactic and he showed up to sign pictures now is usually happens at those conventions.
01:08:25
Speaker
People charge, right? That's what happens. It's cheesy, but like some washed up old star will like, you pay them five bucks and they'll sign their photo for you. And McNee shows up. He's like 85, 87 is the time. He's an old guy, but he shows up and he sits down and they drop a stack of pictures in front of him and he just starts signing away and people take, and some nerd, some nerd actually takes the picture and feels guilty for a second. He's like,
01:08:50
Speaker
Do I pay you? And I'm standing like two feet away. I'm just watching this. I'm marveling at this thing, like, you know, an anthropologist watching gorillas. And McNeese looks at him, pauses for a second and says, God, no, why would anyone want to pay me for my autograph? He keeps on signing.
01:09:12
Speaker
I thought, okay, that's awesome. Now I'm really seriously impressed. He just showed up to just do his part for fandom and he would, he could have stayed home and just, you know, done nothing. Yeah. Yeah. I appreciate that. I always appreciate that. It's the ethos that's a part of what's going on in, uh, your, your boy who wrote that wonderful, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yep.
01:09:38
Speaker
Shall we, let's do the 4Ks. We got so many amazing 4Ks, 4K steel books, box sets, the whole nine yards. The first one I gotta point out, and there's a lot of stuff that they didn't send us, but this is the great 4K stuff they sent us. I will say, first of all, I hate Titanic. I've always hated Titanic. Here's what I knew, and I may have told this story before, here's when I knew that Titanic was gonna be like a massive, massive hit.
01:10:05
Speaker
I'm sitting with my wife, we're at the, we're not married yet. We're still, you know, in the pre-marriage thing. But we're sitting there at the Paramount Theater on the Paramount lot, right? Everyone's waiting for this screening. We're sitting up there kind of in the balcony-ish area. And this thing, we watched three hours and 15 minutes of this thing. And I had the Mark reaction to Napoleon. I was like, oh, huh. That was what I was saying to myself. And I thought, I don't know if he's really gonna make any money. And then I hear,
01:10:36
Speaker
And I look over to my right.
01:10:41
Speaker
And there are these two gay guys that are literally clutching each other and shoving. And I thought to myself, oh, I'm so not connected to what this is going to do. This is going to go through the roof. This is going to go through the roof. I was floored. I was floored. I was like, oh my gosh. I was married in 1997. Hadn't been for many, many years. And I should have kept my mouth shut about Titanic.
01:11:09
Speaker
That's what I should have done. I remember being irritated by this movie in a whole bunch of different ways and for a whole lot of different reasons. Not to mention some of that terrible CGI. It was still terrible now and of course she let that brother freeze.
01:11:29
Speaker
I'm gonna tell you, this thing is out on a 4K 25th anniversary set with a digital code on it for Voodoo or whatever you want, Apple. And even though I don't like this movie, this is a sweet set, man.
01:11:46
Speaker
15 hours of bonus content to go with that three-hour movie. It'll take you a whole day to get through all this stuff. The documentary, Titanic Stories from the Heart, which has all kinds of new stuff with Cameron and Kate Winslet and John Landau, it's really good.
01:12:01
Speaker
It's really good. The other stuff in here, a lot of it is, you know, just kind of silliness, like a ship schematic and, you know, some pre-production prop stuff. Sheet music, none of this stuff. Who's going to play the heart goes on with this sheet music that you get in the 4K anniversary, 25th anniversary box set? Nobody. It's just stuff to kick the price up. But I'll tell you, it's a good looking film on 4K. It's a good sounding film on 4K.
01:12:31
Speaker
This is the thing about Titanic, actually, that I would say this marks the moment when Cameron chooses to move forward deeply in a very hard way, CGI.
01:12:47
Speaker
This marks that moment. And then for the Indians doing 25 years, that's where he has lived, Avatar, blah, blah, blah, all of that. As opposed to the Cameron that we knew prior to this from his Roger Corbin days, certainly through even some of the latter. Like the abyss terminated too. CGI in all of those places, but there was also stuff in those movies. Here is when he decides to just get all in.
Practical Effects and CGI in Modern Cinema
01:13:15
Speaker
Uh, and you know, like, like you said, around this time, uh, uh, Ang Lee did it for a few minutes around this time. Uh, and the results of some pretty terrible movies, some pretty terrible CGI. And I wonder, uh, what those films might've been like. Had they, you know, did the Erwin Allen thing, we just talked about Erwin Allen, uh, and, and just built something and blew it up.
01:13:37
Speaker
True. True. I mean, I feel like, in many respects, those Erwin Allen movies we were just making fun of actually entertained me more. Poseidon Adventure still entertains me more than Titanic. There is nothing in Titanic that I enjoy. All three hours and 15 minutes, there is not one single moment that is enjoyable as seeing Shelley Winters fall and go, ah!
01:14:04
Speaker
I like it when she makes that swim because, you know, I used to be. I used to. I love it. That's so beautiful. So much. So much pesos. Oh, my gosh. Of course. But you know what the hell.
Resident Evil Series Analysis
01:14:15
Speaker
So there is also a 4K Ultra HD box set, a gnarly huge box set of all six Resident Evil films. Now, I was a late comer to the whole Resident Evil thing, so there's a lot of eye rolling that went on and still goes on.
01:14:33
Speaker
the whole the whole kind of future semi apocalyptic feministic quasi mad maxi evilly thing that's going on here umbrella corp and you know raccoon city and all this all this you know zombie it merges a lot of things like mad max and zombies and all this other stuff is just a lot of crap going on here.
01:14:53
Speaker
And, um, uh, ultimately all it is, is just an excuse for a lot of CG driven, um, feminist superhero stuff with Mila Jovovich just, you know, kicking butt. That's basically it. Yeah. But six movies, man. They pushed us to six movies. Yeah, that's nuts. And Mila was, yeah, look, and those early, those, yeah, yeah, you'd share my homie Sherman. He was a big, big, big gamer.
01:15:16
Speaker
Yeah. And this is what it is. So, you know, he drug me into this thing. And early on with Mila, I had a lot of fun with these movies, but six. Plus, I'll tell you what, you don't want to watch your your hot superhero chicks age in cinema. That is not a good idea. Don't do it.
01:15:33
Speaker
Well, what I love about this, and there's tons of extras here. I won't even get into it. I mean, it's just hours and hours of commentary and deleted scenes and documentaries and featurettes and everything else. I mean, just so much. So it's all fan driven. But this did that Friday the 13th thing, where, you know, by the fourth film, they called the fourth film the final chapter. Remember Friday the 13th? Oh, yeah, the final chapter, yeah. Yeah, they were there like 27.
01:15:58
Speaker
So, so we had Resident Evil, the final chapter, followed by Resident Evil Extinction. And after we had the final chapter, and after they were extinct, I mean, final chapter and then Extinction.
01:16:14
Speaker
Oh, extinction came after the final chapter. Oh, no, no. Then we get Resident Evil Afterlife. Oh, for crying out loud. You know, that stuff just kills me. But anyway, it's all here. It is it is intensely stuff.
01:16:30
Speaker
3D, isn't it? Not here. It's all 4K. No, there's no 3D with the 4K. It's just straight up 4K. So no 3D here. There may have been one that was a 3D, but anyway, yeah. And what I hadn't realized, to be honest, I was totally, I did not realize that Russell Mulcahy directed Extinction.
01:16:53
Speaker
Oh, really, Russell, of course, the great, what's that great series that he did in the 80s? Rock and Roll, yeah. I hadn't realized that Mulcahy came out of his own extinction, two extinctions. How do we feel about the Spider-Verse movies? We got a great box set here, like a really sweet Spider
Film Collections and Franchise Longevity
01:17:12
Speaker
-Verse two movie box set, both of them. There's going to be a third one.
01:17:16
Speaker
Obviously. And so you're going to get another box set. They're going to expect you to triple dip on when that comes around. This has a seven inch vinyl record, comic book, art cards and miles sketchbook in it. So there's a lot of junk there that you're not going to want like the seven inch, you know, vinyl record. They're sending us vinyl record like crazy vinyl. Oh, my God. The Oppenheimer score is this kind of great, actually, because we could set up, you know, a table.
01:17:45
Speaker
So, because despite of her stuff, I'm a big fan of that film. It's on the top of my list, near the top of my list of this year's animation. You know, you got to sort of, Boy and the Heron, that's sort of a great jacket. I got to tell you, but out of the American animated world, this movie here, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. See, you're a big fan of that. I didn't, I have to watch that this week.
01:18:12
Speaker
I thoroughly enjoyed both of these films. I thought that the latest Spider-Verse movie, as frenetic and overwrought as it was, because I had a hard time following the plot. I don't even know what universe I'm in now. I'm bouncing between these things. But I thought it did a better job of telling the same story than The Flash. Than The Live Action Flash, which was a mess. And this looks great in The Flash. It did not look great. No. You know, attempting to do in live action what can naturally be done in this animation.
01:18:41
Speaker
We have this fascinating 4K box set from Paramount, too, in addition to the co-paramount, co-20th century. Paramount scares. I love it. Paramount scares collection, which is volume one. Clearly, they are intending on taking a whole lot more of their various horror franchises and packing them up in future sections, so future volumes. So what we have here, very interesting.
01:19:11
Speaker
Rosemary's Baby from 1968, Pet Sematary, the original from 1989, Crawl from 2019, 2022's Smile, and Sweeney Todd, the Tim Burton production from 2007. So this is quite interesting to me, the way that they're doing this. I mean, the only one that is of interest to me here is Rosemary's Baby, to be honest. I don't really care about the others,
01:19:40
Speaker
But if you're a horror buff, all of this stuff on 4K, this is a great way to go about it.
01:19:59
Speaker
They don't all have to be exact, something that says these movies smile and Rosemary's baby somehow go together for some reason that makes some sort of sense, but they're not doing that exactly. So whatever, but still good movies, relatively sweet. So we've got a lot of steelbook action on 4K too. So let me try to piece this together.
01:20:25
Speaker
in a sensible way. So, all four expendable movies are out now. Now, at least, or maybe I should say three expendables movies, because the fourth one is not called expendables, it's called expendforables. That's a stupid, stupid graphical choice, expendforables.
01:20:43
Speaker
So, that is out, the fourth one in just a regular 4K, Ultra HD 4K. Just a, you know, I got it right here and there's a 50 cent looking like he's put on about a buck 50. Yeah, right. Right, yeah. Yeah, he's come like- Come on, dude, we're making a movie here. Yeah. Let's get a keto. Let's get a keto. But you know what? Stallone got himself another franchise. Yeah.
01:21:07
Speaker
Yeah, it's just there's a doc about Stallone out called I think Sly. Yeah. And it's interesting as he sort of walks through his career, and all these franchises and it's just nuts. Here he is again, with the subtle legit franchise, you know, and as most franchises do, they get less good by the movie, but they never another franchise.
01:21:28
Speaker
Well, I mean, it has been fascinating to me how they have kept this going. And some of the people who show up in the fourth one, like Tony Josh shows up here. You know, Dolph Lundgren is there looking ridiculous. And, you know, Curtis Jackson is fine. And Stallone has had more work done. But I'll tell you, seeing Tony Josh show up was really pretty exciting to me. That was unexpected. And Tony Josh. He could watch completely.
01:21:56
Speaker
I had fun with that fourth film, whose plot was ludicrous. Stupid thing, a whole thing on a boat and a ship, and they got to stop in there and go to the world, nuclear jobs. It's just a reason to put all these guys in a tight space and have them beat the slot by each other.
01:22:14
Speaker
I will say the original, the first three films are now Best Buy Steelbook exclusives and they're really pretty steelbooks and there is some fun to the first one. I mean it's got Bruce Willis, Jet Li being very fun and Stallone and Terry Crews and
01:22:35
Speaker
You know, that that that whole Mickey Rourke, I mean, it's it is that first one is really quite fun. Jason Statham is kind of the unsung hero of these movies. He's the one that really holds it together as far as I'm concerned. But then, you know, by the second time you throw Schwarzenegger in there. The best part, the best part bar none of Expendables 2 is when they're in they're cornered and all hell suddenly starts breaking loose. And who is it coming to their rescue?
01:23:04
Speaker
Chuck Norris. And he comes in, and he's got a few lines and a few one liners, and he's out of there. That was great. That's a great look. And by then, these movies are doing something more than just, you know, we're into the sort of cultural archive moment at this point, which is why at this point, I haven't seen Mr. T.
01:23:31
Speaker
in this series. Now, Mr. T has had some health problems, but I think he's over most of that stuff. Bring him back, man. They dragged Wesley Snipes into the third one. They dragged Wesley Snipes into the third one. No, if we're getting into these young guys, let's get some Mr. T in one of these sections. I mean, Ronda Rousey shows up in the third one. You know, it's, I mean, Harrison Ford, for crying out loud. It's just Mel Gibson. Good.
01:23:57
Speaker
It's a lot of fun. It's a lot of fun. It's become a thing where just showing up in one of these movies is just being a good sport. That's what it is.
01:24:11
Speaker
Also on steelbook we have got the the immortal stand by me which is on a and talking about rob riner again as a director it holds up. This is a this is a lovely film it's funny to see all these actors before they grew up. It's a little sad sing river phoenix knowing that he's no longer with us corry feldman cute anymore jerry o'connell is you know. He's jerry o'connell.
01:24:36
Speaker
Yeah. But no, the movie really holds up and does right by the source material. And I can't say enough good things about it. It's got a lovely picture-in-picture commentary track with Rob Reiner and Corey Feldman and Will Wheaton, some featurettes, and a standalone audio commentary with Rob Reiner. And it's a good one. Yeah, deeply moved by that movie way back in the day. Adapted from a, people forget sometimes, a little novella from Stephen King called The Body. It was very beautifully done.
01:25:05
Speaker
Star Trek Strange New World season two. Dude, sell me on this thing. I watched, I have tried. I have tried, I have tried.
01:25:15
Speaker
That's really funny, because people go, yeah, I guess it would be true of Picard as well. Oh, and you're Larry Mantle, our film recolor. He's a big, big fan of Strange New World. Believe it or not, I haven't seen a whole lot of Strange New World, because it's over on Paramount Plus, and I don't always have Paramount Plus. So I was going to let them all stack up, and then, you know, get caught up.
01:25:39
Speaker
It is a beautiful steel book, I will say that. It is beautiful and the extras are copious. I just can't get into the characters. I can't. And the weird thing too, so right, the critics choice sends us, you know, well, not critics choice, they don't send us, but Paramount makes a lot of episodes available for those who vote for television stuff, which includes the critics choice. So we get to vote on that too. And
01:26:03
Speaker
The episode they put forward is the musical circle. Yeah, the one of the few that I actually saw. What? Some people love that episode like they love that Buffy the Vampire Slayer musical episode. It is the one that they love. I don't know. But yeah, interesting. No, no, just no. Not on Star Trek. It was fine on the love boat. It was fine on Scrubs. Scrubs and the love boat are not Star Trek.
01:26:32
Speaker
Get it together. Now, in the musical episode, there's a reason for why they, and this is what they're investigating and trying to, so you know, at least it's just not, you know, so I don't know, but there you go.
01:26:48
Speaker
Interesting. Well, as long as we're on that here, we also have the Equalizer collection. A single case, 4K, Equalizer 1, 2, and 3. Perfect. Perfect. It's a small case, all three movies, great Christmas gift. Denzel kills it. The movies are all basically the same, but we talked about this. We like the third one. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of fun. A lot of godfathers.
01:27:12
Speaker
movie, you know, good Denzel having fun, you know, with the notion of being this guy. Yeah, yes, really, really neat stuff. And we talked about this last week, but we want to recommend it again in the 4k section, the 60th anniversary 4k of Godard's Lumet Prix, otherwise known as contempt.
01:27:34
Speaker
along, and you can get it in a box set with the Blu-ray as well. The regular 4K does not include a Blu-ray, as most of them usually do. So you got to get, you got to make sure you get the little box set with the previous Blu-ray and the 4K, but if you want them both, but it's great. Also, a couple of Christmas themed 4K titles, Scrooged with Bill Murray. You know, it's perfectly fine. I don't know if it screams for 4K, but it's there.
01:28:00
Speaker
It's a movie that I always loved, and that movie was a big flop at the time, but it's a movie that I always appreciated. It has really risen in it. It has risen, and that's, yeah, it's one of those moments, yeah. And then last year's surprise kind of hit, Violent Night, which is basically Die Hard with Santa. And David Harbour playing Santa and bringing the Stranger Things is goody, and that's what it is. It's Die Hard with Santa, and Santa's a badass, and it's...
01:28:25
Speaker
It's actually kind of fun. I've enjoyed it. More so than the Mel Gibson thing two years ago. Yeah, that Angry Santa movie. So a few other classics here to just roll through on 4K. So oh my gosh, it just doesn't stop. I want to get down to two very particular down here at the end. But American Graffiti, 50th anniversary edition, 4K. The fugitive part of the
01:28:52
Speaker
Warner Brothers 100th Anniversary Series 4K. Tons of great extras there, beautiful transfers both. Point Break from Shop Factory. Wow, what's that, 30? 30 for Point Break? 30? Yeah. Isn't that crazy? Isn't that crazy? It's number 151 of their Shop Select line. Beautiful two disc 4K Blu-ray set. The original Young Guns gets the 4K treatment. Emilio Estevez, Keeper Sutherland again from Stand By Me, a little older.
01:29:23
Speaker
Dermot Mulroney, Casey Schimasco, Lou Diamond Phillips, Charlie Sheen. Yeah, the original Young Guns. Better movie today than I gave it credit for at the time, I gotta be honest. All those guys did great. And Stephen King's Silver Bullet, not great, but
01:29:42
Speaker
You know, I mean, in the moment when everything was Stephen King, and again, we have Corey Haim here, as long as we're on the Corey thing. You know, it sort of fills in that body of work
The Color Purple: Film vs. Musical
01:29:55
Speaker
from that period of time. Well, it was a lesser Stephen King book. This is from what the movie's 1985, I forget exactly when the book came out, but it's the lesser Stephen King book, and it made a lesser Stephen King movie. Again, it's in a certain sort of way, it's sort of, I'm nostalgic about it, ridiculously nostalgic about the movie, yeah.
01:30:12
Speaker
And then lastly, a couple of more recent 4Ks, Saw X or Saw 10. More of Jigsaw and that nastiness. That's on 4K for people who want that for Christmas. 20 years of those freaking movies. Oh my gosh. 20 years. The first one was 04, yeah.
01:30:30
Speaker
And Daniel Radcliffe on 4K playing Al Yankovic in Weird, the Al Yankovic story. A little strange, a little over the top, as I think it's supposed to be. Yeah, I enjoy it. What can I tell you?
01:30:46
Speaker
I love the way it plays fast and loose with the truth. In other words, there's not a single moment of anything in this movie that has anything to do with an actual biography of Weird Al Jacobus. That's what's the level. It's either funny or annoying, depending on how you slice it. When they're in a doctor, what's his name's backyard and everybody shows up.
01:31:19
Speaker
Let's spend a moment here at the end here because we got two really, really terrific 4Ks now from Warner Brothers here. Well, one from Universal, one from Warner Brothers. So, one from someone who used to work for Warner Brothers, which is kind of what I want to get into.
01:31:32
Speaker
jumping the gun here on my own stuff so the both of these have oscar relevance this year. One is a movie that is going to be very high and may win everything and really upset warner brothers and the other one is a movie that has now been effectively not i would say remade but is in the mix again.
01:31:54
Speaker
So first, let's talk about The Color Purple, the Steven Spielberg film with Whoopi Goldberg, which was nominated for like 11 or 12 Academy Awards at the time and it won none of them. It was all for all for everything.
01:32:10
Speaker
But, you know, Oprah, before she lost a considerable amount of weight, got a nomination for this and is terrific in it. But this was, you know, here's the thing, I love the new musical.
01:32:25
Speaker
I truly love it. I didn't love this film at the time. And the music- The 1980, whatever, films. Which is gorgeous on 4K. I mean, look, Spielberg directs the hell out of it. It's shot beautifully. Alan Dove, yeah, just shoots the daylights out of it. Danny Glover brings it. Oprah brings it. Margaret Avery is just terrific in this film. But I don't necessarily like the film itself.
01:32:48
Speaker
I can appreciate it. And tell me if you think I'm totally off base here, because I didn't read the book until after I saw this movie. And I realized that the book is really a great piece of modern American literature. It's wonderful historical fiction. It's very, what's the word, elegaic? It's that.
01:33:12
Speaker
And the movie to me felt like Spielberg thought, oh, what a great opportunity for me to do a little John Ford here, a little George Stevens here, little Stanley Kramer over here. And it feels like he's using this story, like he's using Alice Walker's story as a hobby horse or like a clothes horse to sort of hang a lot of his stylistic cinema heroes on. And it becomes saddled, burdened with this preciousness.
01:33:42
Speaker
And I didn't feel like it came alive. The new one does. The musical, which has been out for, I think it's been on Broadway for a good little bit now. 2000, 2006. 2006, and then they revived it in 2015. Yeah, yeah. And the book, so this is the difference. So 1985, The Color Purple, this film here.
01:34:06
Speaker
In the black community, it was this very important film adapted from this very important Alice Walker book. It was a part of our, you know, and we went to see this film and we were left mostly feeling two ways. The film, The Color Purple,
01:34:24
Speaker
when you watch it as a black man. I was, you know, relatively speaking, a black man at the time, I was 24 years old, but I'd been married a few years. And there was not a single sympathetic black male character in that film, right? The beautiful, the wonderful Caesar. What was his name? It'll pop into my head. All of these people, Danny Glover, not a single, and this was the issue.
01:34:51
Speaker
It's not true of the book, by the way. So choices were made. And the choices that were made gave us a film shaped in this way. And to be honest with you, it's left a bad taste in my mouth for almost 40 years. I'm going to tell you something in a second. Thank you very much. Now, this is the musical, which people have.
01:35:12
Speaker
The musical erases that bad taste. And when people talk about the color purple, henceforth and forever, when I get to make recommendations, I've never shown the color purple in any class I've ever taught. The new color purple, the musical, I will be showing for the rest of my life. Let me tell you something really interesting.
01:35:35
Speaker
So, that screening that Mark and Vivian and I went to at the Academy, right, where everybody cheered for the movie and the whole thing and then, you know, Blitz Bozzoule, the director, he's just like the most charismatic man. It's unbelievable. He just, he has this mellifluous voice and he sings very softly and he just captures everybody. He's very charismatic. So, I can see why he's a good director because he just
Oppenheimer's Release and Critique
01:35:58
Speaker
he magnetizes you. And he goes up there with Oprah and the whole cast and he lets the cast go crazy. And Coleman Domingo, star of Ruston as well, comes out in his just fantastic white suit. And at one point, Coleman starts talking about how when they were doing certain scenes, and he and the young actor who plays
01:36:24
Speaker
Oh, yeah, one of the male actors? The young... Because it's Corey Hawkins who plays Harpo. Corey Hawkins. So he was talking about scenes that he had with Corey Hawkins where they were doing scenes together and he turned to Blitz and he says, let's just do it a few more times. We're getting somewhere. We're getting to something, right? I mean, this is a great stage actor who realizes you work it, you work it, you workshop it, you workshop it, you get to an emotional place.
01:36:53
Speaker
He said, because we wanted to get to something about black men, because we felt like we had a responsibility in this film. And I'm paraphrasing what he was saying. It wasn't a dry eye in the house. He said, I feel like, especially in the present time, we had a responsibility.
01:37:12
Speaker
to talk to the dignity of black men and to show that even in the worst circumstances and even under the worst things that even what these men do, there is still some saving grace to them. There is still some dignity. There is something there. And they wanted to get to that in their scenes together. And the fact that he as an actor had the presence of mind to say, I want to get to this. He's not just playing an evil bastard.
01:37:38
Speaker
You can't. This is a guy who is subject to all kinds of human complexities. And he wanted to work there with Corey and really drill down and get to that. And they were both in tears by the time they were done.
01:37:52
Speaker
And to hear him talk about that, I thought, there it is. It's exactly what you're talking about. There's humanity. They bring a humanity to that film that I felt disappeared in all of Spielberg's stylistic obsessions in the first one. Look, choices, choices, choices. There's a Mr. Danny Glover in this film. And Coleman in the other films.
01:38:15
Speaker
Mr. at the end of this film, 1985 film, that little transition. And I'm like, if I had felt any of that across the arc of this film, then this is a film that I love. Mr. Coleman Dominguez, Mr. There's something all the way through. So there you go. But it's not like I hate to call it purple.
01:38:42
Speaker
I mean, look, I love that Quincy Jones score. It's lush. It's just beautiful. It's fantastic. But anyway, let's move on now to the film of the year, likely the film of the Oscars Oppenheimer, which is selling out everywhere. You've heard this, right? Yeah. You can't find this on 4K. What I have in my hands, I could probably pay off my mortgage with this.
01:39:07
Speaker
Seriously, I could take this 4K and I could just auction it and it would sell to a shake somewhere in Dubai. No, this is astonishing. This thing is selling out everywhere. People are jumping all over this, so it didn't just make $950 million. This thing was originally expected to make about $250 million, maybe three.
01:39:26
Speaker
It's more than tripled. It's three hours long. It's a biopic. I mean, it takes place in what no one hurt. And most people who go to see this movie hadn't heard of this guy. And I don't buy the Barbenheimer argument that like a bunch of, you know, 20 something girls are going to go see Barbie and then say, OK, now let's go see the three hour movie about the the atomic bomb guy. And no, it's not going to happen. And we found out those are two totally different audiences.
01:39:52
Speaker
They were animated by the same sort of publicity, but these are different audiences. So what is it? I mean, this thing's flying off the shelf now. People still love it. What is it about this movie? It's an interesting thing. Okay, now, and I will speak to it as a person who appreciates this movie, but doesn't love it.
01:40:13
Speaker
I'm with you. I think it's just one of the things that we started talking about before the show, but I deeply appreciate this movie. Now, Christopher Nolan, Christopher Nolan's screenplays, and he wrote this one all by himself, as opposed to with his brother, which he sometimes does. Now, Christopher Nolan has this tendency to write things and have people say them.
01:40:36
Speaker
And I mean all of them. And that's true of this movie too. People say things in this movie that there's dialogue. And as much as a visual director as he is, my lord, somebody should just be like Chris.
01:40:58
Speaker
All of these sentences need to go away and stop having these people say these things. Now, this is a personal, now I'm going to get to a personal thing. I think that's a perfectly valid, critical critique that I just made about his screenplays period. Now, this is the personal thing I'm going to say now. This particular film, Oppenheimer,
01:41:16
Speaker
Oppenheimer, who did what he did, is venerated for that. And the story about how he got there, all of that, very interesting. Very interested in that, I am, personally. What I'm not terribly interested in is the soap opera.
01:41:32
Speaker
of Oppenheimer's life, his existence, his infidelities, naked Al Oppenheimer. I have no interest in any of that at all.
01:41:48
Speaker
This film is very, it's very interested. I was gonna say obsessed, but I won't say that this film is very interested in that it's very interested in the Peyton Place, same thing in Maestro, which is more Peyton Place behind much of that. Yeah. And, and I don't know, I'm not this film is very interested in that story that it tells about Strumas, the character that that Robert Downey, Jr. Yes, in that whole, this film is
01:42:15
Speaker
very interested in that and frames it in this very particular way. Most of which, I'm sorry, it's just made up. It's just made up. It's just a bullshit drama developed in Christopher Nolan's head about these men.
01:42:32
Speaker
To my mind, this film gets in its own way with a whole bunch of personal drama that obscures the actually interesting thing that this movie is about, which is the development of that fucking atomic bomb. Ladies and gentlemen, you have heard it now from Mr. Tim Cogshell that we don't need naked Oppenheimer and we don't need naked Bernstein.
01:42:54
Speaker
the theme of today's show. No naked Oppenheimer, no naked Bernstein. All you boys keep your clothes on. Well, it is, Nolan has been very upfront about how important it is he thinks that people own the disc so that no streaming service can steal it from us.
01:43:13
Speaker
And there's not a lot by way of special features on here, to be honest. There's a making of thing and there's the Q&A panel and some feature-ready stuff, Movies Anywhere code. But on balance, this is really just the movie. That's really what you're getting. The special features, yeah, I mean, there's a ton of special features, but it's nothing remarkable. Can you isolate the score?
01:43:40
Speaker
That's a great question. I did not go that deep. It's just, it's mostly making up stuff. The score for this, who's the set kid? Littlewood Gordonson, I think. And the special features are all Blu-ray, they're not 4K. They're not 4K. Only the movie is 4K. Yeah, you get the special, which you don't need the special features on a 4K. But you're basically getting the movie and I suspect that there will be a more elaborate,
01:44:08
Speaker
special edition somewhere in the offing. Anyway, you know, some bargain stuff from Mill Creek. Let me just kind of blow through this real quickly. These are these are multi sets, right stuff that throw a bunch of movies on one disc for people who just you know, it's a nice affordable disc, affordable gift for people who love these kinds of things.
01:44:27
Speaker
they got the vault collection from mill creek there are there's a sci-fi from the vault which is twenty million miles to earth creature with the atomic brain it came from beneath the sea and the thirty foot bride of candy rock it is all close schlocky junk except for it came from beneath the sea which is a whole lot of fun
01:44:45
Speaker
But you know what, I mean, there are reasons to watch the others as well. Luke Costello is in the 30-foot bride of candy rock, it's silly. But there it is, you know, late 1950s kind of atomic nonsense. Creature with the atomic brain is all right as well.
Diverse Film Collections and Nostalgia
01:45:01
Speaker
We have another Thrillers from the Vault, eight movies. Some pretty good stuff in here. Boris Karloff shows up.
01:45:10
Speaker
Bel Lugosi shows up, there's The Black Room, The Man With Nine Lives, Return of the Vampire, Before I Hang is a really good movie. The Man They Could Not Hang is- Oh, that movie, that movie, yeah, yeah, yeah, man. So, I mean, there's some fun stuff. There's some, you know, good old-fashioned, I mean, a lot of Boris Karloff here. But Lugosi shows up in The Return of the Vampire.
01:45:31
Speaker
That's worth a look. Then we've got Jude Law in Black Sea and Russell Crowe in State of Play. That's a nice little director spotlight combination here. So both of these from
01:45:52
Speaker
Remember the years? Oh, Black Sea. Let's see. Black Sea is going to be when 2014 ish, something like that. Yeah. Kevin McDonald film, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And something like that. Both of these are Kevin McDonald. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, and then we have on DVD, Robert Duvall in the Apostle and Tom Berenger and a whole bunch of other people in at play at the fields of the Lord.
01:46:17
Speaker
I am lukewarm on the Apostle. It was a little too showy for me, but that play in the fields of the Lord, you know, fantastic. Saul Zance and Hector Babenco, wonderful movie, great music by Zbigniew Prizner. You should see it on DVD, on Blu-ray, but a DVD will do if it's a bargain thing. The Apostle gave Farrah Fawcett a chance to act.
01:46:42
Speaker
And every Blue Moon, Robert Altman did it with her in that one with Richard Gere. Every Blue Moon is late in her career. Somebody would come along and give the fair false of the chance to act, and she always rose to the occasion. Yes, she did.
01:46:57
Speaker
We have another director spotlight here. Four films on DVD don't necessarily need these on Blu-ray, because they're not those kinds of films. These are movies from Neil LaBute. Neil, oh my God, I haven't thought about him a long time. I know. He's probably haven't been depressed in a while. Yeah. Well, he has Nurse Betty, which is not, that's a little curious for him. The shape of things and your friends and neighbors, which are pretty depressing.
01:47:23
Speaker
And then Obsession, which I thought was an absolutely lovely film with Eric Eckhart and Altra. Beautiful love story. Wonderful love story. A little bit of a kind of a present, past, dark shadows, kind of a skipping through time thing. But really, I thought was a wonderful movie. I think might even be my favorite of his films. So those are all on a DVD. And then on Blu-ray,
01:47:46
Speaker
Some other collections, we've got a four-film comedy collection of mostly Peter Falk stuff, The Cheap Detective, Big Trouble, Happy New Year, and Love. And you are really seeing this primarily for The Cheap Detective. Peter Falk made Big Trouble, Happy New Year, and Love as, he's just not remembered for those. But The Cheap Detective is probably alone worth grabbing this and giving it to somebody you love.
01:48:14
Speaker
Uh, we have, uh, Richard Pryor in, um, which way is up and the big, the bingo long traveling all stars and motor Kings, which I had totally forgotten even existed. Also has ability, Williams and James Earl Jones in it. Um, but, uh, I love which way is up. I think prior, he's doing that Eddie Murphy thing of playing all those characters. Well, 10 years before Eddie Murphy.
01:48:43
Speaker
Yeah, and kind of at the same time as Peter Sellers was making a thing and no one else was daring to do it and he does it so well. The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings. Dude, that was produced by Rob Cohen. Yeah.
01:49:00
Speaker
Isn't that weird? That is so strange. I love Rich's a bit because he's trying to break into the Negro Leagues and Rich's character is trying to break into the Major Leagues before anybody else. He tries to break into the Major Leagues as a Cherokee. It's just hysterical.
01:49:22
Speaker
All the things he does, it's just really, really great. The weird thing, I mean, this was a very strange, The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars with Motor Kings, it's a very strange movie, because it came out, I didn't see it at the time, I saw it years later, but John Battam directed this, same year he did Saturday Night Fever, that's when I fell between the cracks. Rob Cohen produced it for him, and executive producer Barry Gordy. That's just a weird bunch of people to be working together.
01:49:49
Speaker
on that movie. I mean, you know, that's, you know, I mean, that's almost as weird. I always thought it was a little weird that Sydney Lomette directed The Wiz, but there was a lot of that going on back then, like it's out.
01:50:01
Speaker
Well, and then to wrap this out, we've got a double danger to movie collection of a waist deep and drop squad. Neither of these movies are, I don't know why Spike Lee presented drop squad. I guess, you know, Oh, it's a culture thing. I don't know. Eric LaSalle, Bonnie Curtis Hall are better than the material warrants.
01:50:23
Speaker
Waste Deep is basically just an early vehicle for Tyreese to do some stuff. We also have White Noise and White Noise 2. The first one with Michael Keaton, the second one with Nathan Fillion. They obviously didn't have a budget to go and get Michael Keaton to come back. I don't think either of these are particularly great, but they have a following, otherwise it wouldn't be out there.
01:50:49
Speaker
the music and romance six movie collection, which has some surprisingly decent stuff in it. It's got a shout with Travolta, Captain Corelli's Mandolin with Nick Cage, right? Connie and Carla is not such a great movie. It's, you know, meh, it's okay.
01:51:08
Speaker
The man who cried with Johnny Depp is, you know, John Turturro is the best thing about that. Caveman's Valentine. Oh, yeah. Samuel L. and Cassie and all. Yeah. That was a significant Andy. And then Madame Suzatska. Oh, yeah. Shirley MacLaine. Yeah, wonderful late Shirley MacLaine there. Yeah.
01:51:31
Speaker
Yeah. So, you know, I was a lot of these are this is a really good set. Captain Corelli's Mandolin, the caveman's Valentine and Madame Suzatska are three legit indie movies from a certain period that are that are worth having in your collection. Yeah.
01:51:47
Speaker
And then lastly, four epic showdown action movies, The Cowboy Way, Cull, The Conqueror, The Jackal, and End of Days. Nothing great here. The Cowboy Way is just kind of a silly buddy. There's really no reason these four movies should ever be together in any way whatsoever.
01:52:03
Speaker
But Kiefer Sutherland, Woody Harrelson, the cowboy way, kind of silly. The Jackal, yeah, you know, it's a gear and Willis doing a thing. And then Schwarzenegger fighting Satan in End of Days is ridiculous. But you know what? I mean, one of these movies will appeal to somebody.
01:52:24
Speaker
We've got some, we've got some silent stuff. We got a couple anime things and we got a bunch of Christmas movies that are interesting. Let me roll through the Christmas titles. Let's do some Christmas, yeah. So we got a holiday collection three one here, Christmas with the Nightly's, Christmas in Big Sky Country and Christmas in Maple Hill. These are all exactly the same. Really, really just pretty young performers who are celebrating
01:52:54
Speaker
Christmas and learning lessons. I'm sure someone will love to put that on the background when they have their party going. I am not one of them. The Oh, you know what? I misfiled this one. I should have mentioned this with the movie boxes. Let's let's take a step aside. The complete police Academy collection. Oh, yeah.
01:53:11
Speaker
Yeah, Michael Winslow popped up earlier. I mentioned this earlier, and I thought I had that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just misplaced it here in the stacks. No, no. The Police Academy, you get a complete film collection. So, 150 in the Shout Select line. And you can watch all the Police Academy movies if you dare.
01:53:34
Speaker
They know a wonderful new scans of all of them we're talking seven films total. And i'm kind of amazed that there were seven films they ended with police academy mission to moscow that was the last one and what's weird tim here is weird.
01:53:53
Speaker
They figured out their audience. Because I didn't realize this until I really, you know, I kind of did a little bit of research. Police Academy was an R-rated movie. The first one, yeah, yeah, yeah. Police Academy 2.
01:54:06
Speaker
was PG-13. OK. The rest of them are PG. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. Isn't that interesting? Yeah. Yeah. Because I remember seeing the original Police Academy. Seven movies, seven directors, by the way. Nobody came back. I know. You know, as they became. And yeah, that was an R-rated movie, that Police Academy at the drive-in. A little bit of nudity in that movie. You know, there you go. Yeah, interesting.
01:54:34
Speaker
and created by Hugh Hudson, who created WKRP in Cincinnati as well. So there we go. So the Complete Christmas Collection of The Office. They do this every once in a while, and they decided to put together all the Christmas shows from The Office, which is a bunch. There are seven of them, seven Christmas shows. And you know what? I never really cared for The Office, the American version of this.
01:55:00
Speaker
but the Christmas shows are pretty funny. Interesting, interesting. There's a real thing that they had going. It's just a little bit, it's just cynical enough that it feels more like the Ricky Gervais thing. Yeah, from seasons two, three, five, six, and seven, from which they draw these films, these episodes.
01:55:19
Speaker
A Christmas story, Christmas. This is the sequel, Ralphie Comes Home. Did you see this? No, because why would you? But okay. Because, you know, it's a sequel, man. And I'm sorry, our Christmas story is, we're done. It's perfect. I don't know what possessed them. It's not charming. It's not. It just don't, don't sully your, your memories of the original. Yeah, Peter Billensley and all the people we love. Melinda, the lovely Melinda, who, Melinda Dillon, who lived in, yeah.
01:55:49
Speaker
The almost holiday spectacular the nutcracker and other tales this is just a lot of sesame street holiday stuff animated elmo regular elmo. My own working with elmo to save christmas it's a lot of it's it's just very very sweet but it's for little kids my daughter hasn't been in the elmo since she.
01:56:12
Speaker
Quite a while now. Hallmark three movie collection, just like that first three movie collection, Christmas with Holly, Silver Bells, and One Christmas Eve, which is, you know, it's okay. I don't know what to say about all this stuff. They just keep pumping these things out. The only thing that's interesting here is that Christmas with Holly was directed by, of all people, Alan Arkish. Yeah.
01:56:39
Speaker
That's weird to me that he's gone to directing like Hallmark movies. Is that what it's come to now? First of all, let's be honest, there's money in these movies. I know. Yeah, there's a lot of money in these movies. It's a little college industry of these movies.
01:56:57
Speaker
that get made and live and exist in these certain sort of spaces. And for a while there, there was a little rain car in the black community because there weren't enough of these movies. And now there's a whole second little contest industry of these movies full of black people.
01:57:16
Speaker
Why don't you mention that because I have here Christmas in Evergreen with Holly Robinson, Pete. Holly Robinson, who was a year ahead of me in school. I was in fourth grade and she was in fifth.
01:57:33
Speaker
That's gonna be my claim to fame forever. You know when Holly was a, she was a, I was a TV singer. Dude, I wish I could say that. Yeah, it was an interesting moment in childhood. Yeah, Holly and Rukia Barnard, Ashley Williams, Barbara Niven. It's, you know, it's a sweet, look, all I can still act. I'm not gonna take anything away from her. She's not doing much of it anymore. She can still act. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you can still act. And so there it is.
01:57:59
Speaker
and directed by Linda Lisa Hater, whoever she is. God bless you, you got a gig. Yeah. And then we also have another one of these on Blu-ray called A Magical Christmas Village with Alison Sweeney and Luke McFarland. This is also from Hallmark. I don't, it's like crazy that they just crank these things out. I don't know what their Christmas movie budget is, but anyway, this is, you know, just family struggling with all kinds of issues and Christmas saves them.
01:58:27
Speaker
And then Lacey Chabert stars in Haul Out the Holly. I love Lacey Chabert. Yeah. And I thought, oh, does that mean her name is Holly? No, no. Her name's Emily, actually. It would be funnier if her name was Holly. Oh my god. She's 41 years old now. I know. Isn't that crazy? That's insane.
01:58:44
Speaker
OK, anyway, that's crazy. So the actual plot of this, this is one of the few that is actually kind of funny. And there's a reason why it's funny. So the idea is that she has to spend Christmas alone in her parents' house, and the homeowners association starts harassing her to do all this Christmas stuff. You know, that's pretty funny. And you know why it's funny? Because Andy Samberg wrote it. Andy Samberg. Hall out the holly. Andy Samberg wrote it.
01:59:10
Speaker
Everybody's getting in on the action. Eddie Murphy has a big one that's streaming someplace right now. Yes, it's the Netflix thing. Yeah. Candy Cane Lane. Yes, yes, yes. I mean, they drug Eddie Murphy into a Christmas movie. Near as I can tell, and I haven't followed the plot necessarily because I haven't wanted to, but near as I can tell, Eddie discovers that Santa is black.
01:59:50
Speaker
and the Tony Danza and the late Betty White in Christmas, which, you know, it's not great, but Betty White's in it and so I cut it a lot of slack. It's, you know, yeah, anyway.
02:00:00
Speaker
I believe that's the plot, which is brilliant.
02:00:06
Speaker
And then a bunch here just to kind of wrap things out. Mrs. Brown's Boys, Holly Jolly Jingles. This is an utterly strange, I've never seen the show. It's on bock pics, I guess. Anyway, so if you've ever seen Mrs. Brown's Boys, I suppose this is, you know, gonna really, really make you just long for Christmas.
02:00:34
Speaker
I guess, you know, it's a BBC thing. It's a it's a British comedy thing. Yeah. A very merry movie collection from Lifetime, Volume six, believe it or not. This is just unbelievable. This has all kinds of Christmas romance in it. Straight romance, gay romance, all colors of romance, yellow is romance, black romance, white romance. It's just everybody getting to love each other on Christmas on Volume six.
02:01:01
Speaker
And there are 12 of these crazy movies. They just can't get enough of them. Got another, let's see, the last one here is an Angelic Christmas. Miracles come in small packages. And this is kind of sweet. It's not great, but it's all right. And this is from Pure Flix.
02:01:27
Speaker
And it's a little bit more wholesome than the other stuff. It's a little bit more faith adjacent, I think is what they say. Yeah, there's an actual angel in it. So it's right in there. A little girl's lost her dad, and an angel comes down to earn her wings. It's a wonderful lifestyle, and it's got all that stuff going. I thought it was great. Yeah. It's very sweet. So there is that. We're right here at the end.
02:02:00
Speaker
Let me pull out a few other things here that might be of interest to people from the holidays. There are some great old classic movies from Warner Archive Collection. We'll cover some of the rest of these another time. But the ones I want to make mention of are the ones that really have some wonderful classic credentials to them. Joan Crawford in Dancefuls Dance. Oh, yeah. Great old MGM title from the early 30s.
02:02:27
Speaker
Young Joan Crawford. Yes. Oh, Joan. 30 o'clock Gable, young Bill Holden, young, just young, every day I'm buying this junk. Yeah, it's good stuff. Elvis in Double Trouble, also for MGM, a lot of the Warner Archive stuff, obviously from the MGM library because they inherited it. This is from Norm Tarrag and just a good classic Elvis, shake your hips kind of thing. Howard Hawks, Land of the Pharaohs, good, you know,
02:02:57
Speaker
a little widescreen period thing that, you know, great music from Dimitri Tiompkin. It's a little cheesy, but it's ancient Egypt and, you know, all the salacious stuff. Oh, it was a young John Collins. Young John Collins. We're doing that. Let's do it. Yeah. The animated Cats Don't Dance, which I am going to show to my daughter one of these nights, is just absolutely delightful. One of the few kind of non-Disney animated films from the 90s that was
02:03:26
Speaker
actually worth watching. This was made for television originally as a TNT thing, but it's really very, very sweet. It's got some great songs by Randy Newman, and it's terrific. You got your Don Knotts voicing in there? Yeah.
02:03:46
Speaker
And believe it or not, you got Scott Bakula and the wonderful Jasmine Guy from, yeah, the voices in there. So, you know, not voices that you hear all the time. Yeah, it's very, very sweet. Very, very sweet. Love that. Got Clark Gable and Gene Harlow in Saratoga, which is, you know, just it's so much Hollywood star power here. Great MGM film from 1937, just before he went to go make Gone with the Wind.
02:04:12
Speaker
It really, really is. It's absolutely terrific. Another big M. James spectacle, The Westward, The Women, which was produced by Dorie Sherry, the great Dorie Sherry, directed by legendary William Wellman, who had done All Quiet on the Western Front.
02:04:28
Speaker
and great score from Max Steiner. But what I hadn't realized was that the story was cooked up by Frank Capra, which is interesting because Frank Capra was working for Columbia at the time. So this must have been something that Capra had sold years earlier and it just worked its way through the system.
02:04:45
Speaker
Oh, yeah. Henry Nakamura is in that film. One of the few films in that era where you see a, I guess, a Japanese actor in a sort of serious role and doing important things. I really appreciated that about that film.
02:05:02
Speaker
A more fun Elvis movie is Spin Out, which has just the best rear screen projection scenes of him sitting in an absolutely still race car. And he's not moving, but man, he's pretending to move really well. It's so funny. Also directed by Norman Tarek, but a really fun film, good music. Elvis, Elvis is not a race car driver. No. This is not, but Shelley Fabares is so gorgeous in this. Oh my God.
02:05:28
Speaker
So fantastic. Spencer Tracy, Joan Bennett and Elizabeth Taylor in Father's Little Dividend, the sequel to Father of the Bride, which is equally wonderful. Directed by Vincent Minnelli, just like the first one was. Absolutely spectacular. You know, just a beautiful, beautiful film. And then the last three here.
02:05:50
Speaker
These are the ones that i just i love so much gay perry with the voice of judy garland a beautiful movie so much fun nineteen sixty two a warner brothers animated film kind of like their version of the aristocats but you know this is this is written by chuck jones and his wife directed by abe levettow all over the voices robert goulay all my gosh so good red buttons yeah
02:06:17
Speaker
Really a fun, fun film. Totally, totally worthy of Disney stuff at the time. Paul Muni in The Life of Emil Zola, one of the great early biopics. More great music from Max Steiner. Just a terrific film from 1937 as well. I think he may have won an Oscar for this. I think he may have won Best Actor.
02:06:38
Speaker
And then lastly, this, it doesn't get more Christmas than this, the original wonderful black and white little women with Catherine Hepburn, Joan Bennett, Paul Lucas, Gene Parker, directed by George Kuker, really just a priceless classic. There've been so many good versions of this, but this one just really, really captures the spirit of it. Marion C. Cooper.
02:07:03
Speaker
was the executive producer of this. A lot of people don't realize that, Cooper and Shod sack. 1933. This is one of the earliest, if not the earliest, right? Yes, it is. The earliest sound version. There may have been a silent, but yeah, but Marion C Cooper produced this, you know, the King Kong fame. So yeah, pretty, pretty great movie, pretty great adaptation really, really captures the spirit. So there is all of that. And maybe I'll mention
02:07:30
Speaker
Just a couple of these anime things. There's the familiar of Zero, the complete series from Sente that makes a really great gift for people who like, you know, anime that focuses on young girls looking a little bit overly cute if you're not too prurient. There it is.
02:07:52
Speaker
I'm not even going to start to get into the Evangelion saga, but Hideaki Anno's Evangelion 3.0 plus 1.11 thrice upon a time.
02:08:06
Speaker
I love it. I love it. It's just crazy, right? It's just crazy. But it's got a theatrical release and did well worldwide. This is Blu-ray and 4K on this thing. This is from Shout. And it's quite a nice package and this really nice custom packaging here. Evangelion as a universe, as a saga is just vast. Oh, yeah.
02:08:29
Speaker
It's another one of those giant world-building exercises in anime that is just impossible to outline. But this is kind of the conclusion to a particular part of this part of the saga. So it's not where you should start your Evangelion, but it's a good place to end it and to break your habit.
02:08:49
Speaker
So if you've been watching a lot of Evangelion, work your way to Evangelion 3.0 plus 1.11 thrice upon a time. And this is part of the rebuild of a galleon saga, which is like four films long. So work your way to that four film saga and then call it quits. Call it cold turkey. Don't fall off the wagon again. You'll be good. You'll be happier for it.
02:09:10
Speaker
Uh, Tim, you headed home for, for the holidays. You definitely spend some time across Christmas, uh, in St. Louis. Uh, but I'm going to go early so that I don't have to deal with any of that. And then I'm going to come back late. So I don't have to deal with any of that, but yeah, I'll kind of be there. Not back on the radio for a minute, man.
02:09:27
Speaker
Yeah, well, I'm on the 15th. So I'm going to be covering American fiction and Wonka. Oh, beautiful. And and what else am I covering? Oh, and give us a preview of Wonka. Because I still need to see Wonka. And you know, I have I didn't look that Johnny Depp situation from a few years ago, I know with Charlie and chocolate factory, whatever. But but, you know, I think Willy Wonka and I think Gene Wilder and I think I'm done.
02:09:53
Speaker
Wonka is, you know, Paul King directed it and I love Paul King. He's the guy behind the Paddington films. So wonderful. I think it's a little bit more of a gig for hire here. I don't think they let him have the free reign he should have had. It's not terrible.
02:10:08
Speaker
It's fine. It's fine. It should do fine. I think it should do fine. But we'll see if people have an appetite for it. It is more a prequel to the Gene Wilder film than prequel to the Gene Wilder film. Yes, that's what it basically is. That's what it slots in as. We're pretending that the Johnny Depp film never existed. And that's just as well.
02:10:28
Speaker
No, just as well. So either way, I will be seeing you at voting on Sunday. I'll be there. All right, man. We'll stake out some territory in the back and try not to make fun of everybody too much. I love it. OK. All right. And if we don't come, we have some things we'd like to try to do before the holidays completely wrap out, some special things. Don't know if we'll get around to it, because we've got some full plates. But if we don't, then just an unbelievably wonderful holiday to everybody. We'll see you the next time.
02:10:58
Speaker
There is snowing all winter through That's where I want to be Snowballs throwing, that's what I do I'm longing to ski, snow Those glistening houses
02:11:36
Speaker
Snow, snow, snow.
02:12:05
Speaker
All those glistening houses that seem to be built of snow Oh, to see a mountain covered with a quilt of snow What is Christmas with no snows? No white Christmas with no snow
02:12:39
Speaker
you