New on Blu-Ray and 4K
This week’s physical media offerings.
Hello Media Magpies denizens, apologies for the weeklong delay after I waited til the very last minute to ask for author privileges. But now I’m here with a super-sized slate of holiday offerings. I’ll start with Criterion, who make you buy 8½ for perhaps the fourth time and continue to put out Coen brothers classics, and also offer two fascinating new releases view their Janus Contemporaries line. Ryusuke Hamaguchi continues his run as one of the best directors of conversation with Evil Does Not Exist, full of stunning images that are ultimately a little less impressive than a long, patient scene of a town hall meeting going sideways. He cares not one bit about following up his international success with a chilly ecological drama whose ending has spawned reactions ranging from “Huh? (positive)” to “Huh? (less positive)”. But he and few other working filmmakers can or would even try to capture the “I don’t give a fuck if you can’t keep up” energy of Bertrand Bonello’s last two films, his miniature lockdown freakout Coma (out now from Film Movement) and his combination technological apocalypse-Henry James adaptation The Beast. I didn’t love the Jamesy period parts except as a showcase for Lea Seydoux being one of the most beautiful women and one of the very best close-up actors (the two are connected but both their own thing, as you can also see in action in this week’s 4K of Immaculate), but Bonello’s bracing vision is all about the 21st century, where age-old romantic doom manifests as, among many other things, malware, incels, glass houses, on-the-nose David Lynch homages, and A.I. I laughed (including at things I felt bad about once I learned their real-world basis), I felt like my head was in a vice, I even thought the credits only being accessible via QR code was a fun, cruel final punchline.
There’s a lot else, with 4Ks including the canonical western, the canonical sitcom, a good argument for the canonical Francis Ford Coppola movie, the canonical “vampires are a lot like grad students and junkies when you think about it” movie, and the canonical movie about a rock ‘n’ roll high school. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t take the opportunity to indulge in the ample schadenfreude provided by Joker: Folie à Deux being a catastrophe of a kind rarely seen anymore, a stupid artist given free rein to follow his muse in the exact opposite direction of anyone who liked the first one. I could believe that it’s better than Joker, in the way that banal boredom is always going to be below a genuine fiasco.
8½ 4K (Criterion)
The Addiction 4K (Arrow)
The Beast (Criterion)
Below 4K (Kino)
The Claim (Kino)
Conclave (Universal)
The Conversation 4K (Lionsgate)
Demolition Man 4K (Arrow)
Eastern Condors (Criterion)
Evil Does Not Exist (Criterion)
The Faculty 4K (Shout Factory)
Far and Away 4K (Shout Factory)
The Holdovers 4K (Shout Factory)
Immaculate 4K (Decal)
Joker: Folie à Deux 4K (Warner)
Kickboxer 4K (Lionsgate)
No Country for Old Men 4K (Criterion)
Piece by Piece (Universal)
Rambling Rose (Kino)
Requiem for a Vampire 4K (Powerhouse)
Riddick 4K (Shout Factory)
Rock ‘n’ Roll High School 4K (Shout Factory)
The Searchers 4K (Warner Archive Collection)
Seinfeld: The Complete Series 4K (Sony)
Severance: Season One (Fifth Season)
Silent Night, Deadly Night 4K (Shout Factory)
Sometimes I Think About Dying (Oscilloscope)
Stir of Echoes 4K (Lionsgate)
The Talk of the Town 4K (Sony)
Ted 4K (Shout Factory)
Terrifier 3 4K (Cineverse)
Transformers One 4K (Paramount)
Willow 4K (Disney)
About the writer
Greta Taylor
Greta Taylor is a trans writer and online personality who's getting closer to figuring things out. Most of her writing these days is on Letterboxd.
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Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Kojak, “Deliver Us Some Evil” – John Ritter is a delivery man and coin thief who after a murder is talked by his fence into pulling a much bigger job so he can flee in style. Ritter is a pretty decent heavy here, given his usual roles later. And as usual the plot is nothing special but is good enough to pass an hour. We also get a somewhat unconvincing shot of Kojak and an informant talking at what is supposed to be New York Harbor but is actually them in front of a projection (think those Liberty Mutual ads). This will apparently be a thing throughout the show, mixing with stuff actually shot in NYC as establishing shots.
NYPD Blue – Simone and Sipowicz mentally break down a suspect in a murder who seems likely on evidence and not great on psychology; when presented with new evidence for a new suspect (that is pretty solid) they get pissy about doing more work. The attitude is not righteous justice-seeking or brutal indifferent professionalism but unthinking laziness, this would be fairly damning if the show had any sense of distance but it does not. This whole bit is part of a series of on-the-job lessons for Sipowicz’ cop-in-training kid, these lessons stop after an extremely obvious event comes to pass and the show is feeling very cliche at this point. Hilariously, Donna leaves for a new job at Apple Computers, presumably she is a billionaire by now.
”Oh C’Mon All Ye Faithful” A Simpsons Holiday Special – This double-sized episode is the first Simpsons I’ve watched in I don’t know how many years. And if Simpsons is “good again” as some outlets would have it, I’d judge it good in a different way from the Golden Era. At least as far as this small sample, the show feels comfortable, with characters dutifully doing their thing, there’s no change or growth, but there’s not a straining for these things either. It’s comfortable, and if that’s not the ideal place for what was once culture’s most subversive show, it’s not the worst place for it to end up either. I enjoyed seeing the family again, and Ned Flanders and a quick shot to Disco Stu, etc. I do hope Julie Kavenar still enjoys voicing Marge, though, because of all the aged voices throughout the cast, hers stands out the most.
I almost find it worse for the show to be blandly comfortable – I like Bob’s Burgers picking up on the show’s sweetness to deliver comfortable laughs every episode in an entirely new show, but I fell in love with The Simpsons because of its ambition, so its current state feels as abhorrent to me as the immediate post-Golden years.
The Shield, “Exiled” and “The Math of the Wrath”
“I’m beginning to think this guy is kind of an asshole.”
Meta-commentary on Clifton Collins Jr.?
And the math of the wrath falls mainly on the bath.
Football
Northern Illinois and Fresno State took the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl to double overtime.
New Orleans running out a bunch of third-string skill-position players simply could not compete with Green Bay.
Caught up on Dandadan, which meant I watched the whole series in a stunningly short window. Overall I’m absolutely in for the long haul, even though I don’t love all the choices and I often feel too old for the whole thing. The mangaka said that he wanted a female led series and all his pitches kept getting shot down, which maybe explains why the male lead is who he is. Somehow most of the cliches feel fresh when you smash them all together, and it’s fun to have almost everyone in the cast genuinely like each other.
“City Of Industry” – when you order Michael Mann from Wish
Kids In The Hall, Season Two, Episode Four
– “Apparently we’re not Nutty Bunnies after all. We’re just college guys.”
– “I stopped smoking, and it’s great. I saved so much money, I bought this bar. It’s called ‘Buddy’s: You’re Sitting In It’.”.
– “He’s gonna need a lot of sex with a man to get through this crisis.”
– “I still refuse to believe Liberace is gay. I just don’t want him to be.”
– “It’s not the naughty words, it’s the filth.”
– I love Buddy roasting Andrew Dice Clay and Eddie Murphy. An extremely gay guy roasting edgy comedians feels edgier than the comedians, especially because he’s being sexually provocative. “And the saddest thing is, I’d still like to have sex with both of them.”
– “Money is no object with me. I don’t have any. Just a little joke. … Jokes, what do people see in ’em?”
– Kevin McDonald is insanely funny in a role that would be already funny played by a woman. This show is quietly but strongly progressive, especially for a bro comedy from its period.
– “Scuse me, I made a little joke there, should I back that up and try again?”
– “Don’t give me that look. Now put on that dress I like.”
– “I vote with my dollar! They’re called dollar-votes!”
– The race between cops and crooks to eat and pay their bill first made me laugh.
Hey, this guy failed to put his writeup in the thread! Let’s get him!
I choose to explain it as a demonstration of extremely respectable authority.
Confession: It has been discovered that I am the one who messed up getting this posted at the proper time last week. Welcome back, Narrator!
Flunk the Blunk!
Put me in “Huh (positive)” regarding Evil! Which makes me sound like Lili Taylor in much of The Addiction, which I would argue makes the (correct) case that grad students are actually worse than vampires.
Just FYI, a group of Magpies is called a conventicle, gulp, mischief, tidings, or tribe. Any of those would do. I’d gladly be in a mischief.
I like the idea of the QR code credit sequence, especially in our IMDb-addled world, but it also seems a little mean to everyone below the line, right? Anyway, I didn’t realize had any Henry James in its makeup at all and now I’m more intrigued.
(Also HI, so glad you’re here.)