Hello!

Happy holidays! We wish we had some warm & fuzzy seasonal discs to promote, but we’re still dealing with residual fantasy releases from Halloween. We hope you’re among the lucky folk surviving the weather, the politics and the general state of the world. Thanks for all the notes, comments and corrections this year.

Oh yes, the first link … This ad piece for a disc company has already received a lot of circulation, but we wanted the link to be recorded at CineSavant as well. It’s a Joe Dante plug for Severin Films that’s edging toward viral status. Several readers tipped us to it, correspondent Phil Edwards being the first.

The extended video piece riffs on Criterion’s notion of a special closet where sticky-fingered celebs get to ‘shop’ for their most desired discs. Joe doesn’t bring a shopping basket, but instead pulls titles off the wall, to wax enthusiastic over their contents, or simply to praise The House of Gregory for going to the trouble to release something obscure.

Joe Dante is a great host, as usual. He’s the whole show. Severin spins the opportunity into a potent sales & image piece.

Plus, we proudly finish off our Parade of Notable Discs for 2025, adding to the group of titles we billboarded for the first half of the year. The presentation always reminds me to think “I didn’t get to see all of that one,” and follow that thought with, “Now can I find it in my messy shelves?”

Actually, we just like to see all the disc covers spread out in one place, like toys in an old Spiegel’s Christmas catalog.

The image just above  ↑  is another random shelf from the impossible archives at CineSavant Central … This time I’ve zeroed in on the Musicals department. The shelves are all two discs deep. That’s a lot of Warner Archive and Twilight Time product up front … I guess the older, more unusual titles are in the back row. Somewhere else we’ve got a couple of large boxes of older musical DVDs. I don’t toss them, in case they suddenly become ridiculously valuable. Someday I can finance my bid to conquer the world, Moo-ah-hah-hah-hah.

The ‘favored’ titles for All of 2025 are below. Good grief, there are some real favorites here, incredibly good movies. I could watch any of these, any time. Each image is a link to the corresponding review.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson