DVDs, 9/4.

Today, with DVD aficionados' attention primarily focused on Criterion's release of Stranger Than Paradise (a package that includes Jim Jarmusch's first feature, Permanent Vacation) and Night on Earth, Dave Kehr is spotlighting a few releases that might otherwise be overlooked:

Invariably described in terms of the three D's - Deranged! Depraved! Demented! - [Teruo Ishii's] lurid filmography seems to include every bizarre subgenre that the Japanese cinema, always highly imaginative in this regard, generated during his years of activity.... But Mr Ishii's heart seemed to lie with a hybrid of pink films and horror that the Japanese call 'ero-guro' (short for 'erotic grotesque'), of which Horrors of Malformed Men remains perhaps the most notorious example. Based on a selection of stories by Edogawa Rampo, a celebrated pulp novelist who took his pseudonym from the Japanese pronunciation of 'Edgar Allan Poe,' Horrors of Malformed Men is less a lucidly plotted film than an exercise in streaming subconsciousness: a dreamlike outpouring of transgressive imagery that opens in a prison for topless madwomen and concludes with an explosion of optical effects that sends (none too plausibly) severed heads and body parts sailing through a purplish sky.

"Ishii is clearly Takashi Miike's spiritual granddad," writes Michael Atkinson at IFC News. "Malformed Men is a ridiculous, ambitious mess, and thus a paradigm for a certain type of movie pleasure-high - the unassuming discovery of a forgotten genre ditty bursting with its eccentric maker's unique perversity."

If your interest is piqued, you might want to see Roberto Curti's essay for Offscreen and interviews conducted by Tom Mes for Midnight Eye and Tavantzis Nicolas for HK Mania.

Somewhat related, at Kaiju Shakedown, Grady Hendrix talks with Matt Kiernan, the DVD Label Manager for Caroline Distribution, which handles titles for Fantoma and Mondo Macabro.

Also not overlooked in the New York Times today: Nobuo Nakagawa's Snake Woman's Curse and Claude Mulot's 1969 The Blood Rose: "Its chief asset is the young Anny Duperey, one of the most beautiful women in French films (Jean-Luc Godard's Two or Three Things I Know about Her, Alain Resnais's Stavisky), who here plays a newlywed disfigured in a fire; her husband (Philippe Lemaire), an artist of great reputation and vague accomplishments, enlists the help of a mad plastic surgeon to put her back together again."

Back to Michael Atkinson and on to Michael Haneke's The Castle: "It's a low-budget, streamlined vision, as gritty and cramped as other Kafka films (even Orson Welles's fascinating version of The Trial) are grandiose and lurid.... Having seen The Castle and, like its hero, failed to get comfortable and secure in its secretive spaces, you feel as if you've genuinely been there, in the rundown, petty-power-distorted Mitteleuropan villages of Kafka's bitter memories."

The Self-Styled Siren on Tyrone Power: "Nightmare Alley shows he had real ability under the gloss."

Phil Nugent rewatches A Fine Madness: "What I had, to my shame, forgotten was what the movie looks and feels like and how much I would love to live in its frames."

"For Paramount, Sunset Boulevard was an idea whose time had come, but no one expected such a poisoned pen house of horrors." More great concept-to-screen storytelling from John McElwee at the Greenbriar Pictures Shows, parts 1 and 2.

Edward Copeland's been watching a lot of movies lately: The Lookout, The Earrings of Madame de..., Ugetsu, Band of Outsiders and Aguirre, the Wrath of God.

Spengler, writing for the Asia Times, Luis Buñuel's The Milky Way is the "20th century's most disturbing film about faith." Via Bookforum.

"Few movies get the second chance to enter the public's consciousness that Primary Colors now has," writes Charles Taylor for Slate. "But with Hillary Clinton running for the White House, Mike Nichols' 1997 adaptation of Joe Klein's sleazy roman à clef about Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign deserves another look - if not for its political insight, then for what it might tell us about the current Clinton campaign."

CW Rogers at the WSWS on White Light, Black Rain: "The new HBO film, made by veteran documentarian Steven Okazaki, allows 14 survivors of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to speak about their memories of that day and those that followed the bombing. Their accounts reveal, in the most personal and shocking manner, the horror that resulted from these barbaric crimes."

DVD roundups: DVD Talk and Bryant Frazer.

Posted by dwhudson at September 4, 2007 3:05 PM