Now that Christmas shopping season is in full effect, it’s time for your Flavorwire editors to swing into public service mode. Yes, yes, all the lists and links and commentary are fun, we know you’re saying, but where are the shopping tips? What do I get my movie-obsessed cousin Donovan? Do I have to actually communicate with him to find out what he wants? Those phone calls always last twice as long as I want them to, and his breathing patterns are disturbing! Fear no more, gentle reader, for after the jump, you’ll find a collection of films and books guaranteed to warm the hearts of your film fan relatives on Christmas morning, which they’ll enjoy to the fullest before fleeing the premises to catch the 1:20 matinee of Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Check them out and add your own after the jump! Read More »
These are tough times for Netflix loyalists. The company’s recent subscription price uptick invoked a fury across the Internet that was, frankly, a little disproportionate; sure, they could’ve handled it better, but seriously, the $20 a month your author is paying for unlimited streaming and one-out-at-a-time DVD or Blu-ray is, any way you slice it, a bargain. The end of Netflix’s streaming deal with Starz that was announced shortly thereafter was ill-timed, but we seldom watched those “Starz-Play” titles anyway, since they were usually in the wrong aspect ratio. The subscriber drop that followed the price increase wasn’t good news for anybody, but the way we saw it, that translated to a shorter wait for that Blu-ray of Thor.
But now there’s this “An Explanation and Some Reflections” email and blog post from Reed Hastings, Netflix’s co-founder and CEO, and even us apologists can’t explain away this madness. Read it (and our contributions to the blogosphere-wide chorus of “WTF?”) after the jump.
Buried way down on the list of this week’s DVD releases — below Limitless and Take Me Home Tonight and Peep World — is a little movie called Skidoo, which you may have never heard of unless you are a bad movie aficionado (as your author is). This 1968 “comedy” was an attempt by Paramount and esteemed director Otto Preminger to make a hip film about the counter-culture geared towards the young people — starring such youth heroes as, um, Jackie Gleason, Carol Channing, Burgess Meredith, Mickey Rooney, and Groucho Marx. It concerns a gangster (Gleason) who is sent into prison to ice an informant and ends up dropping acid and escaping via a flying garbage can. It is as spectacularly ill-conceived as it sounds, and it sank without a trace following its release — though it occasionally popped up on cable, it was never released on home video (not even on VHS) until now.
Of course, Skidoo could be seen via the back channels of bootleg video, but it’s nice to see an oddity like this finally getting an official, authorized, legitimate home video release. And while the movie is an utter mess, it is an undeniably entertaining one, featuring inventive songs by Harry Nilsson and Groucho’s final film performance; let’s face it, even bad movies deserve to at least make it to the marketplace. With that in mind, we’ve compiled a wish list of some other titles that have never made it to DVD — some never even to VHS. Take a look after the jump, and add your own in the comments.
Davis Guggenheim, the Oscar-winning director of An Inconvenient Truth, examines the failings of the US education system in his controversial and poignant documentary Waiting for “Superman.”
Interweaving the narratives of five children with statistics and interviews with education reformers, the film illustrates the more nimble nature of charter schools that can hire non-union teachers and design their own curriculum. But good charter schools, like KIPP, are difficult to get into, and in the interest of fairness, acceptance rests on a cruel lottery system.
It’s tough to be a cinephile in the digital age. Make no mistake — there’s certainly something to be said for the rise in sheer availability these days; it’s hard to even remember a time when your film viewing choices were limited to the lousy stock at your local Blockbuster, to say nothing of our forefathers, who could only take in film classics at revival screenings and on the local TV stations’ “Late Show.” The rise of DVD, the takeover of Netflix, and the influx of streaming options amount to a film fanatic’s dream: just about every movie, available either right now or within a couple of days.
Now out on DVD, director Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void is a visually arresting psychosexual acid trip through the Tokyo underworld.
New to the neon jungle, Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) gets caught up with drugs, while his sister Linda (Paz de la Huerta) finds refuge working at a local strip club. After a bust goes awry, Oscar’s spirit sets sail — but helplessly hovers over the city as his friends and loved ones deal with the aftermath of his indiscretions. Loosely based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead and scored by Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter, the film presents a mind-bending, candy-coated nightmare.
Veteran British music impresario Don Letts’ feature-length punk documentary explores the philosophy of the subculture, from Elvis Presley to the Stooges, Sex Pistols, and the Clash.
Originally released at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2005, the out-of-print film is now back on DVD, featuring cameos from legends such as Jello Biafra, Chryssie Hynde, Jim Jarmusch, David Johansen, Henry Rollins, and Siouxsie Sioux. The two-disc set offers over 90 minutes of bonus material, including short pieces about the fashion, sounds, and spirit of the punk movement.
Four years after it was banned from US release for its explicit content, Destricted brings together creative — and graphic — musings on sex and porn by artists including Marilyn Minter, Matthew Barney, and Richard Prince.
Among the DVD’s eight film shorts are Barney’s “Hoist,” a decidedly erotic take on man vs. machine; Minter’s “Green Pink Caviar,” featuring a woman kissing, sucking, and licking in extreme close-up; Prince’s “House Call,” a revision of a voyeuristic 1970s porno; and Larry Clark’s “Impaled,” for which he interviewed Gen Y-ers on their experiences with porn, then presented the reality of their fantasies. Together, the films are sexy, disturbing, and beautiful, all at once.
The ultimate in crowd-sourced, user-generated, globalized wiki-culture, San Francisco-based designer Brian Singer’s 1000 Journals Project is as analog as can be.
In the decade since Singer distributed the project’s first notebooks — featuring original covers by popular young artists and an open invitation to fill some of their pages and pass them on — the journals have crisscrossed the globe. Along the way, they’ve accumulated powerful, eclectic stories and art, and spawned exhibitions, a book, a documentary film, and a second round of international paper-tag.
Newly released on DVD, Blood Into Wine is both a documentary and an all-new soundtrack celebrating Tool and Puscifer frontman Maynard James Keenan’s brutal, bloody education in wine-making.
Described as a “rock ‘n roll version of Sideways,” this extraordinarily intimate (for the very private Keenan) film is as much about the intense relationship with his business partner Erick Glomski as it is about a season in Arizona-desert oenology and the creative inspiration of the adventure. With cameos by Bob Odenkirk, Patton Oswalt, and Milla Jovovich, it’s also pretty funny.
