Cameron

From Dvd Bliss

Errol Morris' First Person: Complete Series
List Price: $39.98
Release Date: 7-26-2005
Studio: MGM / UA
Length: 491 mins
Video: Widescreen 1.78:1 Color, Widescreen 1.66:1 Color
Audio: ENGLISH: Dolby Digital Surround [CC]



Hailed by Roger Ebert as "one of America's strangest and most brilliant documentary filmmakers" (Chicago Sun-Times), Errol Morris (The Fog of War) brings his unrivalled talents to the small screen for a stylized series of intimate interviews with a unique and fascinating array of people. With the aid of his "Interrotron" - an innovative camera device Morris invented to maintain merciless eye contact with his subjects - the Oscar®-winning director puts his odd assortment of eclectic characters and atypical topics under the microscope to produce "revelatory, whip-smart television" (Baltimore City Paper).

also from dvd bliss

Errol Morris DVD Collection
List Price: $49.96
Release Date: 7-26-2005
Studio: MGM / UA



Includes:
Gates Of Heaven
The Thin Blue Line
Veron, Florida

h8red

thanks for the info. I've been waiting for release dates to be announced. Now I just have to wait for the release date

Corvin

Hey, awesome news. Thanks!

honking

Great News! Just preordered the Errol Morris Box Set from Amazon.com Real excited about this set. Got to meet Errol at Ebertfest last year and the guy is a hoot!

Matt

Quatermass

I used a DDD 10% off code and pre-ordered both of these, too. Normally, I don't pre-order anything, but I've been wanting to see "Gates of Heaven" for a long time.

Josh Z

When I was in college, he presented a rough cut of Fast, Cheap & Out of Control to my class. I told him to lose the gardener character. D'oh!

Corvin

Not much of a bump, but for what it's worth, DDD has the box set for $32 and change (pre-order, obviously). I've never seen Veron, Florida, but his other two films are great.

Heat

Do the movies have commentaries, or documentaries, that go with them? For example, on The Thin Blue Line I know that the guy was released after the documentary came out, I'm kind of curious to know what he's been up to.

robsul82

Well, first the guy SUED Errol Morris, and then...

Cameron

from home media retailing

'Gates of Heaven' Open on DVD
Author: BRENDAN HOWARD
[email protected]

Roger Ebert is quoted on www.errolmorris.com as saying, “After 20 years of reviewing films, I haven’t found another filmmaker who intrigues me more … Errol Morris is like a magician, and as great a filmmaker as Hitchcock or Fellini.”

Self-promotion aside, that’s high praise for a director who hasn’t shied away from every type of film — features, shorts (like the one that aired at the front of the 2002 Academy Awards) and even commercials. Morris is best known for his documentaries, and that’s where he started in 1978 when he ran across an article in the San Francisco Chronicle with the headline “450 Dead Pets to Go to Napa.”

“There was an article about a pet cemetery going out of business,” Morris said. “Then I started to talk to some of the people, and the people I met seemed remarkable.”

Gates of Heaven ended up as a fascinating mixture of the dreams of the heartbroken owner of the closing pet cemetery, the anxieties and business plans of the family-owned cemetery taking in the bodies, and the pain and quirkiness of pet lovers whose loved ones’ remains were being moved.

That film and two others will be included in The Errol Morris DVD Collection streeting July 26 from MGM Home Entertainment. The set is $49.96, the films $19.98 each separately.

“I’m proud of the movie,” Morris said. “I had the occasion to see it again when Ebert invited me to the Overlooked Film Festival. The movie was stranger and more interesting than I remembered.”

While Morris is taking “a break from documentary for a while,” he said he still loves the medium and will return.

“It’s an opportunity to reinvent what it is,” Morris said. “Part of the reason, I think, is budgets are lower in docs and the constraints of the marketplace are different. Hollywood movies have gotten to be cookie-cutter movies. There’s gotten to be a sameness in style and presentation.”

Morris believes a range of documentary styles — “documentaries are diary films, political agitprop, verité, muckraking,” he said — help create more interest in them and, at the same time, free the filmmaker from the constraints of news or strict storytelling.

“I don’t believe in balance,” he said. “Balance is a joke. Balance is stuff that [documentarians] do to convince people they’re objective. It’s kind of faux objectivity. Somehow you provide this or that, and you’re secure against the claim that you’ve been biased. People are biased in how material is presented.”

Morris heard criticism from audiences of his 2003 documentary, The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara, that he presented mostly the words of the controversial Vietnam-era secretary of defense’s views and less from his detractors.

“I’ve had the belief from the first movie that it’s by examining very subjective accounts that we arrive at the truth,” Morris said. “We see [people] wrong, in error, mistaken or self-deceived. By looking at how one person sees themselves and the world, you can learn something about the world.”

Gamblor187

I'm short on cash, so I'll have to Netflix these for the time being. However, "Gates Of Heaven" doesn't seem to be available there. Anyone know why?

illennium

Best DVD news I've heard in a long time! I've been waiting to see The Thin Blue Line again for years.

Gamblor187

Nevermind. It's there now.

MurraySiskind

Anyone think this will be at BB or CC next week? It's only $32 at DDD but it would be nice not to have to wait for shipping.

Corvin

No luck at Best Buy, Circuit City, Tower, Borders, or Target. For shame.

h8red

I just pre-ordered from DDD for $32.62 because my guess was that there wouldn't be a huge interest from the general public. Or in other words, no BM stores carrying it. I'm still stoked to watch them but they haven't come in the mail yet

Quatermass

I got mine last night (pre-ordered from DDD last April). I haven't had a chance to watch any of them yet, but I was a little disappointed with the box on the Errol Morris Collection. There's a sloppily-glued piece of paper describing the discs on one side of the box that I guess you are supposed to peel off and throw away. There's just one smear of rubber cement on the middle so the paper would flap around when you move the box. The glue caused a stain to bleed through the paper but not the box itself. I detached the paper and got rid of the glue and just put the sheet between two of the keep cases. There aren't any other inserts.

The "First Person" box is the typical MGM multi-pack case and is fine, except I had one floater. No damage though.

Hopefully I'll watch Gates of Heaven and Vernon, FL tonight.

gfoots

Anyone know what is holding up "A Brief History of Time?"

TheShiz

yup, he answers that in the dvdtalk radio interview. he doesn't own the rights to it, but is trying to get it released to DVD.

I watched a couple of the First Person series tonight and they were awesome. I've seen thin blue line and gates of heaven, both excellent, can't wait to watch vernon, florida.

and oh yeah, my best buy actually had the collection with gates of heaven, thin blue line, and vernon florida. which was good because I found a use for a bunch of reward zone certificates I had.

RichDB10

Seemingly CDWow can ship my 'Profit' a week before release date yet they can't ship either the EM collection or First Person series to me almost 2 wks after release date..grrr!

Out of curiosity anybody know of any online reviews for features in the collection and the First Person series?

uhftv

I think the entire set is pretty barebones. You dont see a boxest of just docs very often, I think this was just a way to release his earliest films chronologically. 90% of what he's done is now out on dvd, mostly barebones.