An ongoing attempt to make sense of the onslaught of new swag that people want you to buy. Should you? I’ll try and help.
|
|
|
The movie is listed as Pusshîkyatto daisakusen on the IMDB, otherwise known as Pussycat Great Mission! (which honestly sounds like something on the Cartoon Network about stray cats piloting giant mecha felines to fight crime or…something). But here MVD has it on DVD as Operation: Pussycat. A short film (43 minutes), it goes for a retro feel and seems to be trying to summon up the spirit of Russ Meyer…check out the DVD cover, check out the poster for Faster, Pussycat!……see what I mean? Three girls decide to take the money of the richest guy in town in a plot that involves killing his female servant. If you have been wanting to see what Japan would do with forty-minutes of sexploitation homage, then now’s your chance. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)
Region 2 gets a two-disc special edition, but Universal has given us here in Region1sville a bare bones release of Lost Highway. From what I can tell, this is the film’s debut DVD release. Is this possible? Eleven years after its initial release a David Lynch film finally hits DVD? Crazy. And indeed, this is Lynch at his purest and Lynchiest. He gives us two protagonists who share (?) a woman, a mysterious interloper (an excellently creepy Robert Blake), and a nefarious villain (an excellently and comically malevolent Robert Loggia). What does it all mean? It’s Lynch. It means anything you want it to mean. So no worries. I actually enjoyed the hell out of this film, so it’s bare bones release is a bit of a mystery to me. But for those who have been awaiting it on DVD, here you go. Let’s hope we get a better version somewhere down the line. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)
The Kite Runner is a tale of boyhood friendship and how we recover from the betrayals that we barely understand when they happen at the time. And then it’s a tale of redemption, and how we deal with things once we understand…or at least understand better. Two boys growing up in Afghanistan prior to the Soviet invasion are close friends until an incident separates them, and then matters far beyond their control do worse than that. Fans of the book will want to see this if they haven’t already, and those who enjoyed the film will want to snag it on this DreamWorks release. It comes with a commentary from the director, plus the screenwriter who adapted the book, and Khaled Hosseini, who wrote the book to begin with. Nice. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)
|
|
|
State of Play initially drew my attention by the cast: Bill Nighy, John Simm, James McAvoy, David Morrissey and Kelly Macdonald. And then there’s of course director David Yates, who’s currently pulling the last monstrous leg of the Harry Potter film marathon, and also Paul Abbott, who among other things, brought us the original Touching Evil. Basically Morrissey plays an MP whose young researcher winds up dead. Simm plays a journalist who’s investigating and Nighy is his editor. And it’s a political thriller so good you’ll wish for the second series to actually happen, and you’ll fear the inevitable American feature film remake, no matter who’s in it. BBC Home Video has got it here with commentaries on two of the episodes. Worth at least a rental, but you knew that when I listed the cast. It just gets better. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)
Welcome to Autumn’s Grove. It’s a town that seems so happy and safe and friendly that from the first page of Sullengrey: Cemetery Things you know that things are not going to end well. And seriously, why would you want it to? It’s a collection of a comic mini-series that has a bit of everything in it: entrails, mad scientists, a demented asylum, psychotic people who maim other people, weird phenomena, serial killers, and more. Plus a protagonist who denies being all gothy (don’t ask to touch his hair, no matter how cool it looks) while still looking like a cross between Robert Smith and the X-dude Chamber. The writing is pure morbid whimsy by Jocelyn Gajeway. The art is like Ted McKeever on lithium and Drew Rausch’s coloring is probably my favorite bit. This Ape Entertainment release comes with a bonus story and a convo with the creators. Vertigo fans take note. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)
It’s not a secret that I’m a fan of High Weirdness, and no matter what your opinion of the Ark of the Covenant, the fact that more people know of its existence from Indiana Jones than from the Bible makes it fair game for that moniker. Sorry. So if it exists, where the hell is it? That’s what Prof. Tudor Parfitt wants to know in The Lost Ark of the Covenant, and runs from Israel to Egypt to Zimbabwe looking for it. Who knew that big storage building was in Zimbabwe? Not I. Fans of such Biblical adventures will want to check this out: it’s unabridged across nine compact discs and clocks in at ten and a half hours, read by Graeme Malcolm. As this was getting typed up, the typo “the Gabled Biblical Ark” occurred. Instead of Fabled. Now we can’t get the image of the Ark with a wood-shingled roof on top out of our heads. This is out from HarperAudio. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)
