Happy New Year —

I’m skipping a ‘best of’ list this year, only because my lists of favorites were becoming relevant only to me. It was an impossible list to compile anyway, because the literal explosion of desirable titles made it impossible to rank the favorites — I counted over a hundred worthy favorites among just the genre releases. I’ve discriminated by quality (what looks the best) and by rarity (what I never thought this would look this good) and got nowhere. These days, even the most minor releases routinely sport excellent transfers.

The explosion I talk about comes from a handful of non-studio disc companies. We’re by now well aware that the big studios release few older library/vault titles, and prefer to license them to small Blu-ray companies. Shout! Factory, Powerhouse Indicator, Kino, Arrow and a few others have joined Criterion in soaking us with the riches of studio libraries, giving us beautiful HD masters of genre titles that the studios can’t be bothered with. Twilight Time has ceased activity, and Olive Films has also hit the pause button, but we don’t know yet if both are out for the count. Yet 2019 has seen an avalanche of genre favorites, most beautifully remastered. Scream Factory has all but cleaned out the Universal vault of horror and sci-fi films, and other companies have pretty much covered most of the desirable Hammer films, at least the ones not tied up by Warners. Kino Lorber’s deal with Studio Canal has opened a floodgate to a potentially endless stream of exotic / forgotten foreign products. Many of which were seldom screened here, at least not in complete editions, in their original languages.

For the last twenty years we’ve been reading editorials claiming that DVDs and Blu-rays are on the way out, nearing extinction. This is the first year in which mainstream voices are finally echoing what we’ve been whining/preaching/arguing about for years: hard-media home video is the only guarantee of access to one’s favorite movies. Even if you’ve bought a digital version, anything in the cloud can be revoked at any time. Those old DVD collections may suddenly become valuable again, if studios remove their libraries from circulation, except for streaming services under their control. Remember, they OWN the films as intellectual property. Nobody can force them to make individual titles available.

How many streaming services do you subscribe to, in addition to all the new subscriptions one must maintain to do things like run a home computer?  Studios that are pushing streaming in a big way seem to be aligning their distribution model to ‘disrupt’ theatrical distribution. With Disney acquiring 20th-Fox, repertory theaters have been told they won’t be supplied with Fox product, and the foreign disc companies I know have been told that Fox product will no longer be licensed to them.

Nobody knows the future of theatrical distribution for new pictures, but learning about older movies now seems even more of a splinter activity for cinephiles, film students and TCM fans. Cultural Consensus moviegoing, where many of us see the same things, only happens with a few exceptional mega-hits. The ‘average’ folk I know don’t have time to become cinema fans. If they have leisure money they’re into other new pursuits. You could pretty much guarantee that somebody in the 1990s had access to a VHS player, and until 2015 or so most homes I visited could play a DVD. But just because my personal friends have a Blu-ray hooked up, doesn’t mean that most people do. When I say that I have a set that will play 3-D, it’s often assumed that I’m rich (hahahaha) or ‘one of those people’ with a central obsession better avoided in conversation.

But folk that frequent places like CineSavant of course tend to be fellow confirmed movie addicts, many with professional contacts or actually working in the biz in one way or another. That’s where you’ll find serious collectors. Not many consumers buy discs all the time, but I hear from plenty of people who somehow purchase MANY. I think the generation of college students that went crazy for DVDs around 1998 matured out of the habit, as they got deeper into their adult responsibilities… in other words, they became normal consumers, mostly buying Disney discs when their kids demanded them. And plenty of college-age disc fans got out of the habit after a couple of apartment moves, when they realized how bulky discs can be. After not being able to accumulate anything in the first half of my life, I think I’ve kept EVERYTHING from the second half. I still haven’t figured out a reasonable storage/library system for my discs, that’s for sure. I’d ask my sane friends how they got the courage & willpower to divest themselves of so many possessions / collections… but I know I won’t change.

Will people still continue to care about old movies, outside of a small group branded as elitists?   It’s scary when Martin Scorsese ventures an opinion that clashes with popular taste, and all of a sudden finds himself being harassed like a target of a political slur on Twitter. I’ve been through the 2019 releases I wanted to see and found several really fine pictures, but only a couple that I know I’ll want to see again. But right now there must be 500 old pictures that I’m ready to screen at a moment’s notice — I love showing guests things they haven’t seen.

Those are my random end-of-year thoughts about this strange activity / hobby / reason to live that I’ve gotten myself into. Thanks to my fellow reviewers Lee Broughton and Charlie Largent. Here’s a mass link farm that gathers together the cult / horror / sci-fi / western / noir / political / mainstream titles I was most thrilled to see reviewed this year:

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

The personal pix included above:
#1) A goodie given out with Universal’s Scarface ’83 disc. Tony Camonte’s personal motto doesn’t necessarily have to be selfish.
#2) Me and an old sculpture by my son called “Pompey’s Head.” I’m vain enough to sneak this into the lineup.
#3) This is the photo I put up that prompted the most reader mail this year. Two readers wanted to know if it was a from a cut scene (I wish). It grafts together Janet Leigh and The Metaluna Mutant.
#4) Two of my best friends preparing to be ushers for my wedding, back in — don’t ask. On the left is the late author and film historian Robert S. Birchard. On the right is the film editor, Steven Nielson.

Hello!

↑ I have had a fine holiday so far, and some family hasn’t quite arrived for New Years’ yet. In case you’re wondering about the secret to a happy life, it often arrives for Christmas in the form of homemade CARROT CAKE. Raising children has its sterling benefits — it may be a lot of time and effort, but when you’re done you have another person in the family capable of baking such heavenly treats. That’s my totally unselfish thought of the day.

← This is the kind of mystery nobody minds. An unexpected disc arrived, from a company that hasn’t been sending me fantastic/sci-fi product for half a year or so. There’s no paperwork and the unfamiliar address on the envelope gives no clue. Is this a mystery gift from a reader, or a stealth bit of generosity from the disc company?  I really want to know, just to give thanks — I very much wanted to review it, and now I have my chance.

Film students from the ’70s were saddened by the passing this week of the fine film critic and author Peter Wollen. Most of us knew him through his book Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, a brilliant but sometimes frustrating serious look at movie analysis. Wollen could be to movies what Noam Chomsky is to linguistics — a brilliant writer whose full analysis I can’t pretend I fully understood. But what a great book series that was. Andrew Tudor’s Theories of Film from the same imprint, was a little more accessible. So if you were in critical studies in the 1970s, consider this a bumper sticker saying ‘honk if you struggle with Wollen!’→

And let me sign off with thanks to Bradley Powell with enthusiastic hopes for more Olive Films releases. Guess what made a fine festive shirt for Christmas Day? ↓

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Merry Christmas Eve!

No CineSavant content — just pics. Christmas and the Holidays are for the things we love. Here’s the wonderful Jane Greer and the very Irish, very soggy Gorgo !

This was a Christmas card design done by Craig Reardon in 1985… wow, Craig should do a book of these.

If you care, these images super-size when opened in a new window.

I’ll be back Saturday, maybe… Happy Holidays! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

Boy are we hoping that Warners will put out a nice disc of the UCLA Film Archives’ restoration of the 1933 Mystery of the Wax Museum. Gary Teetzel found these before-and-after frame grabs online, which look amazing to me — open it in a new window to see it full-sized. If a Blu-ray does come to pass I’ll be able to tell my meeting-Fay-Wray-story one more time, and we know there’s a crying need for that.

I’ll be reviewing it soon enough, but I sampled the new Kino Blu-ray of Dr. Cyclops and can report that it looks incredibly good — somebody did a full restoration of the Technicolor fantasy film. I remember very clearly the original nitrate IB Technicolor print in the Paramount collection at UCLA, and this looks better than my memory. It’s still the same ‘Dr. Cyclops’ and will likely appeal to core sci-fi fans and not a lot of other folk, but I can’t imagine it looking better than this.

Let’s see here … for fans of Steve Reeves’ 1961 The Thief of Bagdad waiting for word on a German disc announced here a month ago: a reader who received the German release gives a report I don’t know exactly how to interpret. He says it doesn’t look restored but it does look pretty good. Maybe we’ll have to wait for Tim Lucas to say yay or nay before knowing if it’s worth the import purchase. I am already hearing from purchasers of Major Dundee, who I assume they must have ordered the import disc long before my review … so far no complaints, grousing or death threats. That’s the true measure of acceptance!

I’m excited by my new disc of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and want to add my 3 cents to the discussion with a review … even if close friends don’t care for the movie. It’s true: in OUATIH, people drive around a lot!  We see many close-ups of stereo needles landing on record grooves!  Just with those details, it certainly tells the story of my twenties.

I’m also eager to take on Criterion’s The Fugitive Kind, Kino’s Cosh Boy aka The Slasher, and Severin’s new disc of the classic Russian Viy. I may double back for Charley Varrick to take in the new commentary. Just saw the new cut of Coppola’s The Cotton Club last night, and it’s exciting too.

And yesterday was the deadline to get in my OFCS ballot, and get to trimming a tree. I feel good because I just got interviewed for a new Scorpion release, and it went well. Hope you’re having a great ‘pre- Xmas’ weekend.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson