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9 articles from 2009

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Criterion Collection DVD & Blu-ray Disc Sale @ Amazon.com

25 November 2009 1:07 AM, PST | Affenheimtheater | See recent Affenheimtheater news »

Bargain time for all you cinephiles out there! Amazon.com has started a Criterion Collection sale with DVDs from $13.99 and Blu-ray Discs from $15.99. The sale includes 29 titles including Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai and Kagemusha, Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal and the controversial Japanese thriller In the Realm of the Senses (Ai no corrida). European buyers should note that Criterion has so far region coded all their releases to Region A, so bad luck for most of us… …

- Ulrik

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Berlin 2010: Play it Again …! Series

11 November 2009 2:01 PM, PST | Alt Film Guide | See recent Alt Film Guide news »

Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean Seberg in Breathless As per The Hollywood Reporter, the Berlin International Film Festival will mark its 60th anniversary with the retrospective "Play it Again …!," featuring 40 films compiled by British film critic David Thomson from previous Berlin festivals. Among them are Curzio Malaparte’s The Forbidden Christ, Alf Sjoberg’s Miss Julie, Akira Kurosawa’s To Live, Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter, Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum, Niels Arden Oplev’s We Shall Overcome, and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia. Also, Nagisa Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses, which caused a furor in 1976. German authorities — who probably had better things to do (weren’t the Baader Meinhof running [...] …

- Andre Soares

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Movie Poster of the Week: "Hausu"

6 November 2009 7:00 AM, PST | The Auteurs | See recent The Auteurs news »

I wasn't intending to feature a third horror movie poster in a row for this column, but then I saw Hausu, and, more importantly, I saw this poster.

Made in 1977, Hausu (or just plain House) is a cult Japanese comic-horror film never previously released in the Us and directed with bonkers abandon by Nobuhiko Obayashi. Obayashi, who now has some 35 features to his name, started out making experimental Super8 films in the 1960s (you can see one of them here) which led to a career making commercials, often with American movie stars. (His priceless Charles Bronson commercials for the cologne Mandom can be seen on YouTube). He is best known in the U.S., if at all, for 1989’s Beijing Watermelon which played at New Directors/New Films in 1990 (even though it was his 22nd film) and which Vincent Canby described in The New York Times as “in every way a rather ordinary conventional movie. …

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Can Sexual Provocation Still Sell?

28 October 2009 6:15 AM, PDT | ifc.com | See recent IFC news »

Barring some epic year-end bombshell, Lars von Trier's "Antichrist" is sure to walk away with the designation of year's most provocative movie -- with its sadomasochistic sex, penis smashing and spontaneous clitorectomy, it rivals Nagisa Oshima's 1976 cinema scandal "In the Realm of the Senses" in its efforts to shock and offend.

It's a useful comparison. Over the years, international art cinema has often been inextricably tied to our most prurient desires. In the 1960s, foreign masterpieces were as much about championing auteurs as glimpsing a choice piece of European ass. Federico Fellini's "La Dolce Vita" was marketed with blonde bombshell Anita Ekberg dancing around in Dionysian ecstasy, while Jean-Luc Godard's "Contempt" and Luis Bunuel's "Belle De Jour" were literally sold off the naked backsides of Bridget Bardot and Catherine Deneueve. But do such depictions of outré sex still sell challenging foreign cinema today?

As recently …

- Anthony Kaufman

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Tiff #2: "Antichrist" redux

9 September 2009 9:14 PM, PDT | blogs.suntimes.com/ebert | See recent Roger Ebert's Blog news »

Lars von Trier's "Antichrist" is poised to detonate at the Toronto Film Festival. This willfully controversial director will inspire, as he often does, a storm of controversy, debate, critics clamoring to get into advance screenings that are already jammed, and a contentious press conference. Of the 400 or so films at Tiff this year, "Antichrist" was the first that sold out in advance. It was the same last May at Cannes, and that was before it has even been seen.

Von Trier was nothing if not canny in his title for the film. By naming it "Antichrist," he provides a lens through which to view its perplexing behavior. By naming his characters only He and She, he suggests the dark side of an alternative Garden of Eden, and then disturbing his ending becomes a mirror image of Christ welcoming the faithful into the kingdom of heaven. The title instructs us where to begin. …

- Roger Ebert

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My BluRay Shelf: 'In The Realm Of The Senses'

30 June 2009 6:30 PM, PDT | Hitfix | See recent Hitfix news »

I wasn't ready. I first read about "In The Realm Of The Senses" something like 27 years ago, reading a magazine, where there was an article about Nagisa Oshima and his "new" release, "Empire Of Passion," which the article claimed was more like a spiritual sequel to his earlier picture than anything new. In the article, they alluded to the controversy over "In The Realm Of The Senses," and whether or not it was "fair" for the film to get the same rating as pornography.  And because I decided at a very early age that censorship is a pure and simple …

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DVD: Review: In The Realm Of The Senses / Empire Of Passion

26 May 2009 10:00 PM, PDT | avclub.com | See recent The AV Club news »

Bankrolled in succession by French producer Anatole Dauman, Nagisa Oshima’s In The Realm Of The Senses (1976) and Empire Of Passion (1978) have always been packaged together, not least by Dauman, who looked to seize on the loosening of censorship codes to bring a new level of sexual explicitness to the art film. The latter was even released under the title In The Realm Of Passion in an effort to yoke it to the earlier film, which had scandalized the world with its unsimulated sex scenes and graphic, ritualized castration. But Oshima balked on replicating the pornographic hook for …

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DVD Playhouse--May 2009

11 May 2009 11:22 PM, PDT | The Hollywood Interview | See recent The Hollywood Interview news »

DVD Playhouse—May 2009

By

Allen Gardner

Paramount Centennial Collection Paramount Studios releases two more classic titles from its library on special edition DVD: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is John Ford’s last masterpiece (although he would go on to direct two more very good films) from 1962: about an Eastern lawyer (James Stewart) who travels west only to find primal brutality in the form of sadistic bandit Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin, great as always) and pragmatic brutality in local rancher Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), each two sides of a coin that represent a way of life slowly dying out as Stewart’s modern brand of civilization tames the West. A perfect film, period. Howard Hawks’ El Dorado is essentially a remake of his earlier classic Rio Bravo, with John Wayne, Robert Mitchum and a young James Caan as lawmen joining forces against corrupt cattle barons. Great fun. Two disc sets. …

- The Hollywood Interview.com

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Blu-Ray Review: Criterion Releases Controversial ‘In the Realm of the Senses’

29 April 2009 9:30 PM, PDT | HollywoodChicago.com | See recent HollywoodChicago.com news »

Chicago – It’s interesting that Criterion has chosen to give their unmatched treatment to two films in the same week that were drastically censored upon their initial releases - “In the Realm of the Senses” and “The Wages of Fear”. The latter was edited for issues of perceived anti-Americanism and for issues of length. The former was censored for, well, everything.

Blu-Ray Rating: 4.0/5.0 “In the Realm of the Senses” is the kind of film that the modern ratings system has deemed impossible to make and distribute. It is a very adult movie. A film with a lot of unsimulated sex, including close-ups of graphic sexual acts that were not faked in any way. To many, it would be deemed straight-up pornography, but that’s not a word usually associated with The Criterion Collection and it would be doing a disservice to the film. This is proof that there is a …

- adam@hollywoodchicago.com (Adam Fendelman)

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9 articles from 2009

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