Imprint

[therewillbeblus]

Wow, glad to see Across 110th Street picked up on blu by some label following the recently-OOP Kino disc

[domino harvey]

The Counterfeit Traitor would have been one of the last Paramount titles I ever would have guessed would get a Blu-ray release. Good movie, though not $35-good

[swo17]

But is it $24.73 USD good?

[domino harvey]

I paid $19.99 nine years ago for the DVD on eBay, so I guess that's about right with inflation! It is a modestly entertaining and very long lowkey spy drama. If you like other dry 60s spy or WWII films, you'll probably like this.

[John Cope]

Guess I'll have to be buying Cutter's Way yet again.

[4LOM]

Wow, glad to see Across 110th Street picked up on blu by some label following the recently-OOP Kino disc

It was also released in Germany by Wicked Vision in March 2021.

https://www.wicked-shop.com/de/strasse- ... c-set.html

[Finch]

Guess I'll have to be buying Cutter's Way yet again.

I'm doubly glad now that I got the TT edition at a sale a few months ago.

[Walter Kurtz]

Guess I'll have to be buying Cutter's Way yet again.

http://www.willrogerstrailrides.com/contactus.html

Alex Cutter once borrowed a horse here (second photo down)

[Ribs]

Imprint has posted a limited edition stock update on their Twitter, including a few OOP LE titles they found extra stock of:

DAY OF THE LOCUST 32 Copies
HARD EIGHT 30 Copies
MAJOR DUNDEE 29 Copies
DANGER DIABOLIK 50 Copies
THE WINSLOW BOY 14 Copies
THE DEAD ZONE 18 Copies
DRUGSTORE COWBOY 95 Copies
JONATHAN LIVINGSTON SEAGULL 15 Copies
BREAKDOWN 14 Copies
THE BAD NEWS BEARS 50 Copies
FIRE IN THE SKY 6 Copies
TIMELINE 49 Copies
LET IT RIDE 66 Copies
THE BROTHERHOOD OF SATAN 87 Copies
DAYS OF HEAVEN 18 Copies
REGARDING HENRY 2 Copies
THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES 98 Copies
BLACK SUNDAY 152 Copies
HAMMER HORROR 18 Copies
THE FACE BEHIND THE MASK 44 Copies
THE CHALK GARDEN 55 Copies
NED KELLY 18 Copies

They have also confirmed the following have gone OOP:
A REFLECTION OF FEAR
THE HARRY PALMER COLLECTION
COLLABORATIONS: THE CINEMA OF ZHANG YIMOU & GONG LI
SILVER SCREAMS CINEMA
THE ASSASSINATION BUREAU

I bit for HARD EIGHT - I know it's totally meaningless to have these LEs instead of standard editions but given the opportunity arose I figured I may as well have taken it.

[therewillbeblus]

Isn’t the LE just adding a slipcover that’s the same print as the standard cover?

[Ribs]

Not entirely quite I think - I believe the Standard editions use the slipcover art as their art even though the LE has different art on the actual cases inside. So, there’s “exclusive art” on the amaray case of the slipcover. Like I said, it’s a totally useless distinction that I wanted the LE but as it was available I just thought I may as well (way back when it first came out I had assumed one of the labels w Paramount deals at the time would put it out Stateside but clearly that’s not going to happen anytime soon). For anything going OOP there’s been no real rhyme or reason to when or why some Imprint titles have gotten standard releases so there’s definitely reason to prioritize anything that stands out.

[swo17]

I don't fully understand what they're doing, but it doesn't seem like many LEs get SEs at all once they sell out

[therewillbeblus]

Oh rats, I had no idea. Might have to spring for The Winslow Boy and Drugstore Cowboy after all

[swo17]

By my count, 24 of their LEs have sold out, only 7 have received standard editions, and one of those SEs has also sold out:

Sold Out Limited Editions
01 The War of the Worlds
02 Sorry, Wrong Number
03 I Married a Monster from Outer Space
04 The Duellists
05 Waterloo
06 When Worlds Collide
07 No Way to Treat a Lady
08 A Place in the Sun
09 The Carpetbaggers
10 Night Falls on Manhattan
14 Hard Eight
18-21 Essential Film Noir Collection 1
24 Year of the Dragon
25 At Close Range
26 Fire in the Sky
27 Rage
30 The Bridges at Toko-Ri
31 The Bad News Bears
33 Five
54-56 Silver Screams Cinema
67-74 Collaborations: The Cinema of Zhang Yimou & Gong Li
75-77 The Harry Palmer Collection
84 A Reflection of Fear
86 The Assassination Bureau

Standard Editions
01 The War of the Worlds (also sold out)
02 Sorry, Wrong Number
03 I Married a Monster from Outer Space
04 The Duellists
05 Waterloo
06 When Worlds Collide
14 Hard Eight

If I had to guess, I'd say they initially planned to do standard editions for all the LEs that sell out, but then curbed that plan. Who knows if we'll ever see another one? Unless things change and they announce a big wave of titles coming back in print, I wouldn't count on anything being available after the LE sells out

[Ribs]

It is a little strange when you lay it out like that - I guess maybe the standard editions didn't sell well? It seems odd they just do not exist for anything released in the past year-plus, especially when you have titles like the Noir box ones I'd think would do fairly well as standalones. I guess the set that has been just announced as OOP will be as good a test case as any, as all those titles sold out really quickly so if we don't hear back in a month or two about any coming back they might have just abandoned the Standard Edition follow-up model altogether.

[Ribs]

Coming in May:

The Contender
Bloody Sunday
The Warriors
After Dark: Neo Noir Cinema Collection One (After Dark My Sweet (1990), Rush (1991), One False Move (1992), Mortal Thoughts (1992), Flesh & Bone (1993), and Twilight (1998))

[swo17]

Warriors costs double for including two cuts, and the After Dark set is their second to feature a booklet

[therewillbeblus]

After Dark, My Sweet is an excellent oddball of a neo-noir. My writeup:

After Dark, My Sweet: This is almost too fitting to the thematic and atmospheric qualities of noir, capturing the loneliness of its players and bolstering the yearning philosophy that one must be needed to be worthy, truly becoming a noir for our advanced world of further disconnect and even bleaker disillusionment. I love how paranoia sets in as sane behavior amongst the crazy, and how characters are trapped in elongated scenes stewing in the hazy moral space of relentless guilt and shame flip-flopping with greed and apathy. For these scenes to transform into sex or violence at random only adds to the destabilization of a sober path to finding identity or actualizing desire. The undefined, anthropologically-intricate femme fatale is the best part of this film thanks to Rachel Ward, though everyone is top-notch- from Patric's deranged antihero, who sways between a faded fugue state and manic tics, to Bruce Dern's wacky master planner, who gets excited by another's erratic behavior even when it puts him in jeopardy, to George Dickerson's closeted "mentor" to Patric, who embodies a walking ethical dilemma with equal parts lust, trust, loneliness, and professional duty. Watching his trajectory as he responds in body language and action, perpetually torn between his various impulses, is something to behold. It's a conscientiously masterful performance for a complicated character. The ending keeps us dancing on a jagged knife of disorder through the credits, permanently at a distance from truth except for the facts of isolation these people gravitate to even when physically together, thus making us one with them in the only area where there's no confusion for anyone.

[domino harvey]

My writeups for the three from the Noir box that I’ve seen

After Dark, My Sweet (James Foley 1990) Artsy noir adaptation of the Jim Thompson novel, shot with visual wit and smartly plotted and laid out. This is a movie made by people who understand noir conventions and hold their source material in just the right amount of reverence to produce a strong film adaptation. Jason Patric is surprisingly effective in the lead as an escaped mental patient who finds his way into a conventional noir kidnapping scheme and double-cross. There's also an interesting b-plot that hints without ever making explicit a local doctor's prurient interest in Patric's patient that for all the sex and language and violence in this film manages to transport the film back forty years prior (and it works!). Bruce Dern is a lot of fun as "Uncle Bud" (Which is just the perfect name for a man too unflaggingly genial to be trusted about anything) and Rachel Ward makes a better noir femme fatale here than she did in Against All Odds. Full of the requisite twists and tragedies of the best noirs, this is an easy film to recommend for this and our upcoming Noirs redux, should you be moved to vote for a few post-classic era titles.

Flesh and Bone (Steve Kloves 1993) A strong film and welcome rec, even if I didn't quite find room for it on my list. This was described as a mood piece in the recommendation and boy is it ever, especially in the superb opening sequence, wherein silence brings violence swiftly and cruelly. The film is about the kind of awful coincidences which occur regularly in crime fiction, of which this owes a bit of debt as Dennis Quaid plays a Texas vending machine big wheel (or as big as that distinction merits) who says little and seems at all times on the verge of wincing in pain and the relationships both old and new which bring him to some degree of peace for the actions at the beginning of the film. James Caan is colorful as Quaid's too-aggressively charming father and Meg Ryan didn't quite work for me as the stripper turned romantic interest, but to my eyes the film really belonged to Gwyneth Paltrow, who steals the picture in an early turn as the klepto beauty too far gone for any sense of reform or salvation. It's the kind of one-note performance that works because it never wavers from the negative reinforcement of the character's worst qualities and any fool could see she was on her way to stardom here.

Twilight (Robert Benton 1998) And here's the flipside of [the experience of enjoying Absolute Power, also discussed in original post]: throwing a lot of great and/or capable actors together and hoping they'll rise above mediocre material. They can't and don't. I loved Benton's last take on updated noir, Nadine (I'm in the minority, though), and liked the Late Show, but this third bite at the apple provides meager sustenance. While watching I could intellectually rationalize how every component of the complicated plot could have gelled and worked, but something is just "off" in every interaction, every listless filmmaking choice, every phoned-in new weirdo just going through the motions. Even the notion of featuring characters at the end of their lives (in the titular twilight years) was already touched on better in the Late Show-- a cannibalization of a cannibalization sounds like a good set up to a punchline ending with this film. Paul Newman is okay in the central role of the former PI who may or may not have had his P shot off (this is indicative of the strange tone of the film, which often presents things which are not funny as though they were), but the rest of the cast-- Susan Sarandon, Gene Hackman, Margo Martindale, Liev Schreiber, James Garner, Giancarlo Esposito-- are rudderless and/or embarrassing. And one especially wonders what Reese Witherspoon saw in her four minutes or so of inconsequential screentime that was worth a lifetime of unsafe Google Image search results. Actually, what anyone involved saw in this is the only real mystery afoot, but I can guess: Newman signed on, and then everyone said, "Well, if Paul Newman's doing it, and the guy making it has all those Oscars, I guess it must be good." Guess again.

I’ve also seen the Warriors but am fine with the existing $5 Blu-ray. I watched Bloody Sunday like within the last year and still remember next to nothing about it…

The Contender is hinged one one of the most obnoxious sanctimonious “twists” ever,

Spoiler

When it turns out Allen could have proven it wasn’t her because of a birth mark but instead subjugated herself to horrendous treatment because of moral objections to the moral objections. Like, I get the principle of the thing, but this movie would have been two minutes long with a more realistic protagonist

[therewillbeblus]

So I don't think there's anything neo-noir about Rush, which is squarely occupying the space of a crime film divorced from noir tropes (even the music is just about as far as you can get from anything noir!) The film starts out strong, using its ample runtime to detail the process, risks and excitement around the life of an undercover agent without overdoing it. Scenes are deliberately cut and modeled after classic narrative momentum from the 30s police procedurals and crime films, albeit meditating on an acknowledgement of the grey space these agents need to engage in for self-preservation of mind, body, and spirit. Unfortunately, by the midway point the film jumps the shark and the moral regression feels unearned for the same reasons the film succeeded in its early sections: these core principals were fleshed out just enough but appropriately left a mystery to let us join them on this equally unpredictable ride that hinges on excitement and fear from not knowing what will happen next and resigning safety nets of support found in the 'normal' world of trusted systems (or markers of cinematic logic). Once the progression sped up, I just didn't understand or care about why the addiction or actions propelled as they did, and found myself disengaging and rolling my eyes a lot after being glued to the screen thinking 'hidden masterpiece!' for its first hour. Either way, it gets a recommendation for that first section, and maybe I'll come around to the rest in time.

So far, this set feels like a good buy. I only have Mortal Thoughts left to watch, and the only "bad" film is Twilight (though it's as terrible as domino says). I also really liked Flesh & Bone, perhaps not as much as domino, but for the same reasons. Scott Wilson's midway moment is unexpectedly and quietly powerful, totally unnecessary to what could have been a programmer- yet a welcome addition to the complex ethos the film is orbiting around regarding personal history and the traumatic effects riddling one's internal states. And yeah, Paltrow elevates the movie into greatness whenever she's on screen.

[therewillbeblus]

And Mortal Thoughts ranks along with Twilight as a bottom-barrel neo-noir. While Twilight should work in its twisty funhouse narrative of rotating players, never hitting its mark, Mortal Thoughts is less forgivable, employing a stupid concept that attempts to ruminate on domestic violence trauma in the most obnoxious possible way. The 'twist' doesn't play fair to the audience or the characters, and undermines the resilience angle as well as portray buried trauma in an unrealistic and offensive light, for the sole purpose of further marginalizing its principals and condescending to the audience in order to force a twist- while thinking it's aiding both participants' opportunities to forge an empowered relationship with justice.

[Finch]

Really hoping someone in the UK (Indicator or Arrow most likely) rescues One False Move as I already have the French BD of After Dark My Sweet and don't feel like paying premium price for a set where the remaining four films range from good to lousy.

[DeprongMori]

March titles:

The Osterman Weekend (2 cuts priced like 2 films)
The Hunter (Steve McQueen's final film)
China Gate
Conquest of Space
Marooned (cited by Alfonso Cuarón as an influence on Gravity)
Audrey Rose
Johnny Got His Gun

The Osterman Weekend was one of the few Peckinpah films I hadn’t seen yet. Watched it last night, and it’s probably one of his worst. I am something of a Peckinpah completist, so I was still tempted by the Imprint release, but not at that price. While it might have been interesting for the extra commentary, the old “Sam Peckinpah Commemorative 2-Disk Edition” DVD from Anchor Bay does have the extra Peckinpah rough-cut as well as many of the other supplements. That’ll have to hold me.

[beamish14]

March titles:

The Osterman Weekend (2 cuts priced like 2 films)
The Hunter (Steve McQueen's final film)
China Gate
Conquest of Space
Marooned (cited by Alfonso Cuarón as an influence on Gravity)
Audrey Rose
Johnny Got His Gun

The Osterman Weekend was one of the few Peckinpah films I hadn’t seen yet. Watched it last night, and it’s probably one of his worst. I am something of a Peckinpah completist, so I was still tempted by the Imprint release, but not at that price. While it might have been interesting for the extra commentary, the old “Sam Peckinpah Commemorative 2-Disk Edition” DVD from Anchor Bay does have the extra Peckinpah rough-cut as well as many of the other supplements. That’ll have to hold me.

Osterman is obviously flawed, but it has some of the best set pieces of his career-the flaming pool sequence is just astonishing, and one of the most jaw-dropping things I've ever seen.

[beamish14]

After Dark, My Sweet is probably my single favourite neo-noir, and I think it's arguably the best Jim Thompson adaptation ever, at least until someone makes Pop. 1280 and gets the comedy right. Jason Patric, Rachel Ward (who I truly miss seeing in films, but she's had a very successful directing career in her native Australia), and Bruce Dern are all amazing. I'm tempted to call it Dern's finest performance. Mesmerizingly bleak and angry film that I'm so glad can finally be experienced in HD.

I've yet to see Rush, but I've read the roman-a-clef novel that it's based on. The author (who Jennifer Jason Leigh's career is based on) actually was an undercover narc who started using and then, I believe, tried to rip off impounded evidence. Great read, and it goes well with another book from the era written by a former con that was in development as a film, Seth Morgan's Homeboy (Darryl Ponicsan, author of The Last Detail and the mind-blowing afterschool special for grown-ups The Boost adapted it).

Jason Patric really had a lot of potential. I've heard that he's, ahem, extremely "difficult" to work with, which has contributed to his career stalling.