Will 3D Movies and Television Die a Slow Death? Ron Schenone, MVP

Will 3D Movies and Television Die a Slow Death? Ron Schenone, MVP

BCB Movietime 2011-06-01

BCB Movietime 2011-06-01

Banksy ♥ Murdoch « LRB blog

Banksy ♥ Murdoch « LRB blog

In his new title sequence for The Simpsons, already shown in the US and due to air in Britain on 21 October, the graffiti artist Banksy tracks away from the Simpson family on its suburban Springfield sofa to show a subterranean Asian sweatshop making Simpsons merchandise. A child dips images of Bart into a vat of acid, kittens are pulped to make stuffing for Bart dolls, the tongue of a beheaded dolphin licks envelopes, an enslaved panda hauls a cart, an exhausted, broken unicorn punches holes in DVDs.

Why would the producers of a TV show that rakes in billions of dollars for Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Entertainment Group allow a notoriously subversive artist to satirise so bitterly the exploitative underside of its own comedy? Because it knows that by doing so, by being big enough to contain and hence neutralise mockery of itself, it will make more billions.

Murdoch’s plan to take full control of BSkyB in Britain, with all the potential for Foxification of British TV that this entails (in the US, the English X-Factor producer Simon Cowell shares a network with the ranting, weeping American nationalist demagogue Glenn Beck, whose show he has hinted at emulating) has so given media rivals the heebie jeebies that papers as mutually hostile as the Guardian and the Daily Mail have made joint representations to the government to try to stop it.

It would be more comforting if Murdoch were an ideologue, but what the Banksy Simpsons sequence points to – rather like Beck himself, whose manner teeters between hate-mongering and comedy – is less the desire to promote an ideology than to contain all ideologies for the purpose of profit, with entertainment being the preferred container. What Murdoch seems to want to be is the context of all things, the ultimate Manichean media shell. Inside, left v. right, tree hugger v. petrol head, local v. transnational. Outside, profit, the void, and Murdoch, looking down.

MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW (Masters of Cinema) released on DVD

Make Way for Tomorrow a film by LEO McCAREY is released in the UK on Blu-ray on 25, 2010

 

 

SYNOPSIS:

 

Of Make Way for Tomorrow, Orson Welles told Peter Bogdanovich: "Oh my God that's the saddest movie ever made." Long unavailable for home viewing, Leo McCarey's personal favourite among all his films (which included The Awful Truth and An Affair to Remember) is sad, yes, but it also stands as cathartic affirmation of the dignity of human feeling, and in the testament of such achieves a subtle complexity of characterization on par with Renoir, Ford, and Hawks.

 

Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi, two of the great Hollywood character actors, appear makeup-aged beyond their actual years to portray the couple whose house the bank has foreclosed upon (the film was set and produced in the midst of the Great Depression), and who are forced subsequently to move into their children's homes in the city. A near-musical restructuring of gratitude and debt ensues once the offspring deem the couple's lodging an imposition: the two are separated, then reunited weeks later... as they glide inexorably into an uncertain future.

 

Unrelentingly unsentimental, yet maintaining a balance of pathos and levity unseen in not only American studio pictures but most of the rest of world cinema, Make Way for Tomorrow exerted a powerful influence on Yasujirô Ozu's Tokyo Story and several other key entries in the Japanese master's body of work. It is a film profoundly concerned with questions of filial obligation and the way we treat one another as human beings; it is a film that, to give Welles the last word, "could make a stone cry." The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present Leo McCarey's truly great Make Way for Tomorrow for the first time on Blu-ray anywhere in the world.

 

Make Way for Tomorrow is released on October 25, 2010

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SPECIAL BLU-RAY ONLY EDITION INCLUDING:

 

• Gorgeous high-definition transfer of the film in its original 1.37:1 aspect ratio

• 20-minute video piece with filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich (The Last Picture Show; The Cat's Meow) discussing the film and Leo McCarey's career

• 21-minute video piece with writer Gary Giddins discussing McCarey's work and the social and political contexts of the film

• Optional English SDH subtitles for the deaf and hearing-impaired

• Lengthy booklet featuring a new essay on the film by writer and Library of America editor Geoffrey O'Brien, and an excerpt from Josephine Lawrence's source novel Years Are So Long

 

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DETAILS:

 

Blu-ray Catalogue No: EKA70025

Blu-ray Barcode: 5060000700251

Blu-ray RRP: £22.99

Release Date: 25 October 2010

Certificate: TBC

Run Time: 92 min

Format:  1.37:1 OAR/ Colour

Genre: Movie Classic

Director: Leo McCAREY

Year: 1937

Country:  USA

Language: English

Subtitles: English SDH (Optional)

 

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Taking time off

Following two bad bouts of flu I'm taking a couple of weeks off. If urgent, please call my cellphone.

New 'Metropolis' for UK cinema release

Fritz Lang's 1927 scifi classic Metropolis, a reconstructed and restored edition of which premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival on Friday February 12, is to have a UK cinematic release later this year, followed by a new DVD and Blu-ray edition in The Masters of Cinema Series.

Fuller details will be posted here in due course.

Extracts from the unreconstructed movie

Peter Greenaway's Nightwatching out on DVD March 26

View trailer

Peter Greenaway explores the romantic and professional life of Rembrandt and the mystery surrounding his most famous work of art, The Night Watch in this 2006 film, now to be released on DVD in March.


Featuring a cast led by Martin Freeman, (The Office, Love Actually) and starring Eva Birthistle, (The Children, Breakfast on Pluto) Jodhi May, (Emma, Defiance) Toby Jones, (Frost/Nixon, Infamous) and Nathalie Press, (My Summer of Love, Bleak House) Nightwatching is set in the year 1642, which marks a dramatic turning point in the life of Rembrandt, a sudden fall from grace as a wealthy respected celebrity, into a broken and discredited pauper.


When Rembrandt reluctantly agrees to paint the Amsterdam Musketeer Militia in a group portrait that will later become to be known as ‘The Night Watch’, he soon discovers that there is a foul conspiracy afoot amongst the Amsterdam merchants playing at soldiers, an insidious plot surrounding a thirst for power and wealth, undertaken with the bloodiest of means.


Determined to expose the conspirators and their plot, Rembrandt builds his accusation meticulously in the form of the commissioned painting.


Unveiling to the world what will become his most celebrated work; Rembrandt has also unleashed exacting revenge from the conspirators in question, sealing his fate in history and imminent downfall.


Hre is an extract from the movie.