CineSavant Column
Hello!
Yes, it’s true, we have no new disc reviews today. For the entire month of May CineSavant has had but one review per posting. This is because we’ve been far from home. As you can see just above, I haven’t been suffering for scenery. Southern California is terrific in many ways but it is also a desert, and after various droughts our trees are in pretty sad shape, even many of the most resilient. At our destination — can anybody guess where — I had a solid month of staring at the greenest, healthiest-looking trees I’ve seen in years.
CineSavant was supposed to be 100% back in action last Tuesday, but we had to overstay our trip a full week — so the fallback plan is to be fully functional this next Tuesday, May 30, the day after Memorial Day. The house sitters have been piling up all the mail, including discs to be reviewed. Charlie Largent and I will be attacking that stack of movies as soon as we can get our mitts on them.
Until then, I asked Charlie and our co-reviewer Lee Broughton to pick some CineSavant reviews of which they were most proud, that they thought turned out well. I’ve added a few more. Maybe you don’t remember some of these. In any event, here’s a list of OLDER REVIEWS WORTHY OF A LOOK-SEE. That’s in addition to the old autobiographical DVD Savant article linked from the featured image at the top of the day’s post. Thanks!
And Gary Teetzel sends along two more links he’s gathered up for us. The company SRS Cinema has announced that it is going to release a Blu-ray of a little-known Japanese film with elaborate practical and miniature effects, the 1962 thriller The Whale God. It’s not a Kaiju per se but more like a variation on Moby Dick, about the vengeful pursuit of an unusually large whale that has a habit of killing off the members of a particular family.
It was produced by Daiei; the key interest for Kaiju fans is the presence of actor Takashi Shimura, and also the music score by Akira Ifukube. Full details and a Japanese trailer are posted at the Sci-Fi Japan page: SRS Catches the Daiei Thriller The Whale God.
And as a parting shot, Gary also forwards this link to a highly unusual trailer — one of the weirdest ever. Is it actually a trailer, or a piece of film to be grafted on to prints of the movie it is advertising, to extend the running time by two minutes? It explains itself clearly enough. We wonder if it might have been inspired by the screwball trailer Alfred Hitchcock made for the same year’s Psycho. Here you have it:
An important warning from The Information Service.
Gary Teetzel says we should be grateful that the ever-vigilant Information Service is on the job, 24-7. Thanks for reading! Glenn Erickson